Multiple MacRumors readers in Australia have reported being able to add their Commonwealth Bank cards to Apple Pay, and Commonwealth Bank is listed as a partner on Apple's Apple Pay site in Australia.
Commonwealth Bank first announced plans to support Apple Pay last month, giving in to consumer demand after a years-long dispute with Apple over fees and access to the NFC chips in iPhones.
When announcing Apple Pay support, Commonwealth Bank Group Executive of Retail Banking services Angus Sullivan said that the bank had heard many requests from customers asking for Apple Pay, leading to its implementation.
"We are committed to making changes that benefit our customers and simplify our business. We will continue to look for more opportunities to innovate and listen, to ensure our customers get the best experience when they bank with us. Responding to customer demand for Apple Pay underscores our commitment to becoming a better, simpler bank.Commonwealth Bank, along with NAB and Westpac, tried to collectively bargain with Apple to attempt to force Apple to open up the iPhone's NFC capabilities to support other digital wallets, like those offered by the banks themselves.
Apple said that this would be harmful to consumers and would stifle innovation, a position that Australian regulators agreed with when denying the banks authorization for collective bargaining.
Thanks for all your gentle prompts. We read them all. Now you #CanApplePay 👏 pic.twitter.com/RJM4IBpvhA
— CommBank (@CommBank) January 22, 2019
ANZ was the only one of the four major banks in Australia to support Apple Pay when it launched in the country in April 2016. Other smaller banks later implemented support, but Commonwealth, NAB, and Westpac continued to hold out amid negotiations.
It's not clear if NAB and Westpac will implement support now that Commonwealth Bank has done so.
Bankwest in Australia is also now supporting Apple Pay, along with ASB Bank Limited in New Zealand and Bank of America Merrill Lynch in Canada. Multiple smaller banks in the U.S. have implemented Apple Pay support as well, with a full list available on Apple's website.
Top Rated Comments
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Westpac have lost 30% of their market cap over the last two years and is being investigated by the government for bad practice. Nope, I don’t think they are that great
All banks in Australia have lost market cap mainly due to regulation and capital requirements. They still are a dividend play like always, not a growth play.
Westpac still is the second largest by market cap in the country.
To lastly state they are getting investigated for bad practices is fake news. There is a royal commission taking place and from my view Westpac have come through far better than any of the other majors and the only major to retain their wealth arm of the big four.
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Get real
You're seriously trying to compare the Australia, with a population of what, 25 million to the US's 325 million?
You could dump the entire population of Australia into four or five mid western states and you be hard press to find your cousin.
If Australia was state, it wouldn't even be the largest state by population, California has more people.
There is no irony here.
Only a much larger economy with a scale you failed to take into account.
Here is some background into US challenges:
UK’s Lessons For US Mobile Payments Adoption ('https://www.pymnts.com/nfc/2016/uk-lessons-for-us-mobile-payments-adoption/')
Here's an excerpt:
NOW FOR THE “BUT”
OK, you say, so all we need to do now is hustle up and get contactless POS terminals out there in massive force.
If it were only that easy.
In the U.S., there simply aren’t the same dynamics in play.
Two million contactless terminals today sounds like a great start — until you do the math. There are something like 13 million POS terminals across a massive geography that is the United States, not including mPOS devices.
The U.S. is also a market in which there are 1.2 billion payments cards in circulation, more than 47 billion debit card transactions, more than 26 billion credit card transactions and 209 million adults over the age of 18.
Oh, and something like 14k financial institutions that issue those cards and countless merchant acquirers and ISOs all hawking merchants to deploy new terminals.
It’s a whole lot harder to wrangle this ecosystem to the ground given the diversity of merchants and the engrained plastic card habits honed by consumers over the last 50 or so years.
I do love how much room we have to swing a cat (the one size is basically the same as the entire US) oh and we tend not to shoot each other too much.
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