Will Apple Pay Forever Change the Way We Pay for Goods and Services?
As most of us have heard, Apple Pay gives users a way to forego cash and credit cards – and it is rumored it will be released on Monday, October 20th.
So-called mobile proximity payments are expected to grow exponentially over the next few years. How will this change the way we pay for things? While it seems like a convenient to not have to worry about carrying around credit cards or cash, consumers still have the possible danger of storing important financial information on their phones. Like it or not, the mobile payment sector is immensely popular with consumers.
Apple Pay lets people store certain credit cards inside of Passbook, and use the NFC chip and TouchID fingerprint reader to send that information to capable terminals. The known retail locations where Apple Pay will work include Panera, Starbucks, Target (via their app), Staples, OpenTable and Uber (among others). Apple says they plan to be ready in 220,000 retail locations when the service goes live.
Earlier tap-to-pay efforts from the likes of Google and Samsung never made much headway. Apple is planning to make a bigger splash than any other company has for this service. To start, their fingerprint technology is one step above Google wallet. Besides that, Apple has proven time and again to make a bigger impact when it comes to getting consumers to adapt to new technology.
Recently, Twitter and Facebook began competing with Apple, Google and PayPal to own the emerging mobile payment sector. Twitter now allows users in France to tweet payments to others in their network. Soon enough, Facebook will allow users to enable payments to anyone in their social network.
We are definitely excited to check out the service, however, we believe the payment system may only succeed if major retailers get behind it. That, and it’s only available on the newest iPhone’s. I guess that’s one more reason to upgrade, right? For more on Apple Pay, visit Apple’s site here.
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