Apple Pay Gains Nearly 60 New U.S. Banks and Credit Unions

Jesus, who cares about these issuers? Just use a credit card anyway.

How about getting more merchants to accept Apple Pay and to have Apple staff going around training clerks and store managers how to use the terminals?

How about making sure these terminals actually function?

Using Apple Pay should be easy. Now its 50/50 that it will go off without a hitch even at locations that accept Apple Pay.

How about universal acceptance at a store?

For example, Best Buy accepts Apple Pay....but not ALL Best Buys accept Apple Pay. Same with Target. That's ridiculous and should be corrected before nonsense like "Bill's Bank of East Hanover NJ is now an Apple Pay issuer."

Umm... Apple Pay is up and running... Apple can't control retailers and force them to implement NFC terminals and train their employees. That's not how real life works. I've never once had any issues with apple pay, granted I've probably only used it close to a dozen times, because of how rarely I visit Apple Pay enabled stores. I agree Apple should try to coerce merchants as best they can, but they don't have a lot of leverage (I'm guessing they are already trying as best they can). Incentives would be fine and dandy, but until merchants switch over NFC as a whole will never take off.

If they were doing as much as they can, merchants would love switching over to NFC.

Offer merchants 10 cents per $100 for Apple Pay transactions, I'm sure the retailers would be all over Apple Pay then. A retailer that conducts $30,000 per day in Apple Pay transactions would pad their profits by $30. Retailers are so cheap these days, that they won't balk at a $30 profit per day, per store.

The Australian and Canadian banks would also be on board.

2015 was supposed to be, "the year of Apple Pay." Turns out it wasn't.

The company that runs the cafeteria where I work just bought new cash registers and installed them right before the new year. What does it have? A screen with a magnetic strip reader built into it. No chip card slot, no NFC. What a joke. I know the process will take some time, but honestly at this point, the U.S won't ever reach 50% of the total market share in NFC and chip payment systems. Why do you buy a brand new register after the liability shift that only takes magnetic strip cards?

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My second rant on this Apple Pay subject-- where are the new merchants?

One would think you'd see, "Apple adds 20 new banks and 10 new merchants to partner with Apple Pay."

Nah, we haven't had any new merchants since August sign up for Apple Pay (Rite Aid, and technically they aren't even a partner).

The list should look more like this every month or so:

New Stores
Target
Burger King
CVS
Byrne Dairy
Price Chopper
Tops Markets
(Small Business A)
(Small Business B)
(Small Business C)


Seriously... I'm going to be dead before the U.S fully adopts chip and contactless NFC payments, and only 24 years old.

Jesus, who cares about these issuers? Just use a credit card anyway.

How about getting more merchants to accept Apple Pay and to have Apple staff going around training clerks and store managers how to use the terminals?

How about making sure these terminals actually function?

Using Apple Pay should be easy. Now its 50/50 that it will go off without a hitch even at locations that accept Apple Pay.

How about universal acceptance at a store?

For example, Best Buy accepts Apple Pay....but not ALL Best Buys accept Apple Pay. Same with Target. That's ridiculous and should be corrected before nonsense like "Bill's Bank of East Hanover NJ is now an Apple Pay issuer."

Well, while I do think that more banks/card issuers is a better thing, you're definitely right about making the merchant experience more consistent and better. I gave merchants a year+ to get their acts together on Apple Pay (contactless payments, period). Time's up. I had my debit card number stolen three days before Christmas.

I am now vocal when I go into a store that doesn't offer it, or has the terminals but does not have them activated. I have begun letting merchants know that if they don't make Apple Pay available to me they will lose my business. Period. I am tired of their lax security practices putting my financial health and privacy in jeopardy. I wrote Petsmart an email recently to tell them that the fact that they have had NFC readers in their stores for over a year, and still don't have them operation has caused me to start using Petco.

I also let merchants know that they are wasting my time making me sign a credit card slip when I use Apple Pay in their store.

I know that some on these forums will state that it's silly to get up in arms about this, but I don't agree. This is not just a cool tech geeky/convenience issue. It's a security issue, and I take that seriously. Also, not telling a merchant you're not happy with them is the same as telling them everything is okay like it is.

And yet, they cannot make a deal with the 5 major Canadian Banks... We have the most freakin NFC terminals out there.

Completely agree, though you'd think with Apple's vast resources they'd be able to do both.

With all this work to get banks signed on, not to mention the difficulty of getting banks to sign on overseas, I now wonder if Apple may have been better off setting up their own bank or buying one, and operating it as a separate subsidiary, like its own Amex division.

They could have reduced the fees to retailers which would have sped up adoption, but taken a big enough cut to make a difference to their bottom line. With incentives like rewards towards the purchase of Apple products, it would also have made the platform stickier and increased sales of their core products.

I think everyone here is severely underestimating how horrible the credit card industry is. I work for a credit card processor. Everything is held together with baling wire and a prayer.

To give you an idea, here are the hands a transaction passes through with a normal processor. First, you swipe the card in a terminal. Chips and NFC tokens are effectively the same as a swipe for this purpose. The terminal at the store takes it and hands it to the terminal vendor. The terminal vendor takes it and hands it to the store's selected processor. The processor hands it to the card brand (Visa, Mastercard, AmEx, &c.). The card brand hands it to the issuer. The issuer hands it to the backing bank. All of these parties get your card data, and they can all be different people. It's an enormous string of middlemen.

None of the banks handle settlement in the same way. Each issuer talks to their set of backing banks and presents one unified interface to the card brands, but each issuer's interface is different. The card brands all talk to their issuers using whatever the issuer wants, then they each present a completely different protocol to the processors. The processors talk to all of the card brands, but they all have a different interface for the terminal vendors. There are huge numbers of deals and contracts involved. The EMV rollout in the United States is going far, far faster than I expected.

As an aside, the security issues in EMV are nightmarish. The chips can be cloned. Chips on stolen cards can be locked open in a way that causes most terminals not to check if the card has been stolen. After working for a credit card company and seeing how little people actually care about keeping cardholder data private, I've switched to using cash for everything I can.

I really cannot believe how many banks there are in the US. These enormous lists keep being published, when will it end? I don't know how many we have here in the UK, but I wouldn't have thought there are many more than 60 in total!

I am still amazed people like Wal-Mart and Target want their own clunky payment system. I know they want the customer data...but using Apple Pay (mostly at Fresh Market, Whole Foods, and Panera right now) is so incredibly fast and MUCH faster than "chip & sign". You would think other retailers would want faster throughput for customer satisfaction.

Well in this specific example what benefit would the extra expense provide to an employee cafeteria? I mean, presumably cafeteries on a whole don't experience much credit card fraud. But a cafeteria whose only customers are employed by the company in which it is located? I would think almost none.


Mike

That's a good point, to a degree. I read an article a few months ago that discussed how many businesses were not spending the money to upgrade their systems because their historically fraudulent transactions were less than the cost of buying new equipment. The management of most of them stated that they would just wait until they needed to upgrade their systems for other reasons, and make the shift then.

However, like the OP I am perplexed about any business manager who would spend the money to upgrade their system and not put NFC and EMV in place.
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It's disappointing that merchants are slow to adopt, but then the average joe isn't aware or have taken your point of view.

I've used Apple Pay a few times and it's really an awesome process, you would think that all merchants would want to have that kind of experience when shopping at their stores. But then it cost money to invest in these systems, it would be better that Apple provides some type of help to reduce the cost.

I obviously do not know what Apple is doing behind the scenes, but perhaps publicly Apple can express some statement on what they are doing to apply pressure or help in the matter. I mean, to entirely blame it on merchants doesn't help matters when Apple can do something as well to help with adoption.

Why should merchants adopt Apple Pay when there's just a select few that take advantage of it.. It's Apple service, shouldn't they provide some assistance as well. Now, I do know enabling NFC also helps Google as well... But I think Apple is more valuable to NFC simply because Apple users are more likely to use it.

I agree that we don't know what Apple is doing behind the scenes. But given the number of partners who were ready to go at the beginning, both merchants and banks, and the number of banks and issuers who have signed up since I would say they are likely beating the bushes pretty hard.

Hopefully they will do something to entice more merchants to get on board. And I am not unsympathetic to the mom and pop store who just doesn't have the margins to replace all of their hardware in quick order.

But the most frustrating examples of non-participation to me are the merchants who have NFC terminals in place, but refuse to make them active, and the merchants who are proactively trying to undermine Apple Pay in order to push their less secure, less consumer friendly models. Those are the merchants for whom I reserve my most scathing comments/feedback.

Barclay's - Britain's second largest bank - still hasn't enabled Apple Pay for its customers. Maybe I'd be better off banking with The First National Bank of Mount Dora. They seem to have managed it :)

Leave them, I did.