Two popular Japanese prepaid money cards will be gaining support for Apple Pay later this year, allowing the cards to be added to the Wallet app for contactless payments using an iPhone or Apple Watch where accepted, it was announced today.
The cards set to gain Apple Pay support include Seven & I's Nanaco card and AEON's WAON card, as noted by Ata Distance. The blog, which focuses on mobile payment and transit cards in Japan, believes it will likely become possible to add the cards to the Wallet app shortly after the public release of iOS 15, which is expected in September.
As part of its Apple Pay announcement, Seven & I said it has issued around 74 million Nanaco cards that are accepted at around 800,000 retail locations in Japan, including 7-Eleven and Ito-Yokado stores. Likewise, AEON said it has issued over 87 million WAON cards that are accepted at more than 840,000 retail locations across the island country.
Apple Pay continues to expand to more issuers around the world, including ING in Belgium and FNB in South Africa earlier this month.
Nanaco and WAON cards appear to have very cute branding ?
Very clever names, too.
How do these compare to Suica on apple pay? Suica is super easy to reload on your phone (can use apple pay credit card). But maybe these two are accepted in more places?
Each has its segment of the market. Nanaco will be good at 7-Eleven convenience stores and (more importantly to me) supermarkets under the Seven and I Holdings umbrella. Waon is accepted at other convenience store and supermarket chains.
Suica is widely accepted, and has the huge advantage of being able to be set as an express transit card. So, even when used for non-transit transactions (stores, restaurants, etc.), it's not necessary to double-click the iPhone or Apple watch. Just wave and go.
"Nana" is one way to pronounce the word "seven," which refers to the "seven" in "Seven and I Holdings" (itself a combination of "7-Eleven" and the first letter in "Ito Yokado," which is part of the conglomerate).
The Waon card mascot is a dog, and "waon" is an onomatopoieia for a dog's bark, and the Waon NFC terminals make a barking sound when the transaction is successful.
Most Japanese e-payment cards have very clever names. Here's a page from a book I helped write that explains the meaning of Suica (mentioned elsewhere in this thread) as well as the Icoca card.
Most Japanese e-payment cards have very clever names. Here's a page from a book I helped write that explains the meaning of Suica (mentioned elsewhere in this thread) as well as the Icoca card.
Thank you! I was wondering why they called this card "watermelon"… ?
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Wednesday April 24, 2024 3:39 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
Wednesday April 24, 2024 2:05 pm PDT by Joe Rossignol
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Top Rated Comments
Each has its segment of the market. Nanaco will be good at 7-Eleven convenience stores and (more importantly to me) supermarkets under the Seven and I Holdings umbrella. Waon is accepted at other convenience store and supermarket chains.
Suica is widely accepted, and has the huge advantage of being able to be set as an express transit card. So, even when used for non-transit transactions (stores, restaurants, etc.), it's not necessary to double-click the iPhone or Apple watch. Just wave and go.
The Waon card mascot is a dog, and "waon" is an onomatopoieia for a dog's bark, and the Waon NFC terminals make a barking sound when the transaction is successful.
Most Japanese e-payment cards have very clever names. Here's a page from a book I helped write that explains the meaning of Suica (mentioned elsewhere in this thread) as well as the Icoca card.