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MCX CEO Out After Best Buy Begins Accepting Apple Pay

Tuesday April 28, 2015 7:42 pm PDT by Husain Sumra
currentc_phoneJust a day after Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that MCX member Best Buy would begin accepting Apple Pay in stores later this year, MCX, the company behind Apple Pay competitor CurrentC, announced that current CEO Dekkers Davidson has left the company. He's been replaced by former Bank of America Merchant Services CEO Brian V. Mooney on an interim basis.
“MCX was created to capitalize on a tremendous opportunity for consumers, and I look forward to taking the company through the next exciting phase of bringing CurrentC™ to the market,” said Mooney. “MCX has a talented team in place backed by the determination and resources of many of the world’s largest and most successful merchants. Building on that foundation, we’re focused on making CurrentC™ the consumer preferred mobile payments app.”
MCX spokeswoman Kristin Parran Faulder told CNET that the move had nothing to do with the Best Buy announcement. Coincidence or not, CurrentC, which is expected to launch widely later this year, will face increasing competition in the mobile payments sector from the more recently announced Samsung Pay and Android Pay as well as a growing Apple Pay. In recent weeks, Apple's payment platform has gained the support of Discover, GameStop, NBA teams and more in addition to Best Buy.

Best Buy was the second MCX member, after Meijer, to offer Apple Pay support. Last October, former MCX CEO Davidson had said that there were no penalties or fines for leaving the MCX program. MCX exclusivity agreements with retailers reportedly end in summer 2015, which means that MCX members like Best Buy would be able to offer Apple Pay in retail stores once the agreement ends. A Best Buy spokesperson told Re/code yesterday that while the company is still invested in MCX they weren't prepared to declare launch support for CurrentC at this time.

Tags: MCX, CurrentC
[ 143 comments ]


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penajmz
56 months ago
Oh they're still around?
Rating: 39 Votes
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jacobh101
56 months ago
...And then we have CVS still refusing to offer Apple Pay even though they have the technology, instead they'd rather use QR codes, ha gtfo
Rating: 37 Votes
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farewelwilliams
56 months ago
"tremendous opportunity for consumers"

what?
Rating: 36 Votes
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redman042
56 months ago
They should close up shop now. After all this time they still haven't rolled out anything and in the meantime Apple's far superior solution keeps picking up steam.
Rating: 25 Votes
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ZCT
56 months ago
Perhaps they should call themselves ObsoleteC.

And heck now they have a Bank of America big wig running things, what could go wrong with customer service? All they need now is Comcast to run their customer service department, and to launch in Sears and K-Mart, and they'll be golden.

Golden like Blockbusters. :eek:
Rating: 21 Votes
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jonblatho
56 months ago
Love the iPhone-Android frankenphone they made in that image. :rolleyes:
Rating: 18 Votes
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tillsbury
56 months ago
Brilliant. Why doesn't anyone ever ask me to be the "interim CEO" of a dying company on a nice fat salary. I promise to be nice, and not complain when it all turns to crap, as long as you pay me well during the descent...
Rating: 14 Votes
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Paddle1
56 months ago
Samsung Pay and Android Pay sound like satire.
Rating: 14 Votes
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Michael Scrip
56 months ago



There is the fact the banks and CC companies obviously don't want to share any transaction fees with Apple, plus they don't like the fact Apple isn't mining any customer data for them, so they're naturally going to try to come up with their own more favorable (to them) system. In order to win consumers over however, they would have to convince us CurrentC is as secure as the security features built-in to :apple:Pay.


Banks and credit card companies seem to be in favor Apple Pay. Look at all the promotion they are doing:




It's the stores who do not want to pay CC fees. They came up with the idea to link a mobile app directly to your checking account to avoid credit card fees.

And what we got was CurrentC... which is a mess.
Rating: 13 Votes
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Evmanw
56 months ago
everytime I see something about CurrentC

https://xkcd.com/927/
Rating: 12 Votes

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