Apple Pay launches at 200K self-service stations, including parking, laundry & vending machines
More than 200,000 self-service stations across America -- including vending machines, coffee brewers, parking pay stations, kiosks and laundry equipment --?will gain compatibility with Apple Pay, thanks to support from USA Technologies Inc.
The maker of wireless, cashless payment solutions for self-serve retailing industries announced its support for Apple Pay, effective immediately, on Tuesday. Its products are geared toward small-ticket, unattended retail aplc
"Our customers are excited to accept Apple Pay at the self-serve locations they operate," said Stephen P. Herbert, chairman and chief executive officer of USA Technologies. "We anticipate that the millions of consumers who frequent these locations will appreciate the convenience and security of using Apple Pay for their everyday purchases, and we believe that Apple Pay will help to drive additional sales for our customers."
The company began building NFC capabilities into its products a decade ago, and currently supports cashless transactions through its flagship ePort systems. Its products include partnerships with Visa, MasterCard, Verizon, Coca-Cola and others.
"USA Technologies has always sought to provide convenience, security and an easy way to pay for consumers who are less and less likely to carry cash," Herbert said. "We recognized early on the potential for mobile payment, and promoted the technology to ensure our customers were ready for this shift to occur."
Support from USA Technologies follows an announcement by Western Union revealing that it has also begun accepting Apple Pay for money transfers and bill payments. MasterCard and the PGA Tour also announced their support for concessions purchases this week.
Apple Pay contactless retail and point-of-sale payments debuted last October. At launch, it had support from a number of banks, credit card providers, and an estimated 225,000 retailers, and those numbers have only grown since.
Support for Apple Pay is currently limited to the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, but it will also be featured in the forthcoming Apple Watch when it debuts later this year.
The maker of wireless, cashless payment solutions for self-serve retailing industries announced its support for Apple Pay, effective immediately, on Tuesday. Its products are geared toward small-ticket, unattended retail aplc
"Our customers are excited to accept Apple Pay at the self-serve locations they operate," said Stephen P. Herbert, chairman and chief executive officer of USA Technologies. "We anticipate that the millions of consumers who frequent these locations will appreciate the convenience and security of using Apple Pay for their everyday purchases, and we believe that Apple Pay will help to drive additional sales for our customers."
The company began building NFC capabilities into its products a decade ago, and currently supports cashless transactions through its flagship ePort systems. Its products include partnerships with Visa, MasterCard, Verizon, Coca-Cola and others.
"USA Technologies has always sought to provide convenience, security and an easy way to pay for consumers who are less and less likely to carry cash," Herbert said. "We recognized early on the potential for mobile payment, and promoted the technology to ensure our customers were ready for this shift to occur."
Support from USA Technologies follows an announcement by Western Union revealing that it has also begun accepting Apple Pay for money transfers and bill payments. MasterCard and the PGA Tour also announced their support for concessions purchases this week.
Apple Pay contactless retail and point-of-sale payments debuted last October. At launch, it had support from a number of banks, credit card providers, and an estimated 225,000 retailers, and those numbers have only grown since.
Support for Apple Pay is currently limited to the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, but it will also be featured in the forthcoming Apple Watch when it debuts later this year.
Comments
AI really needs to do something about these ads that hijack your browser. I clicked this story using my iPhone 6 and was automatically transported to some portal site which then took me to the App Store for me to purchase Madden NFL Mobile.
I recommend the AdBlock extension for Safari on OS X.
Too bad Safari on iOS doesn't work with AdBlock (and extensions in general maybe?)
IMO, ?Pay and Swift were amazing 2014 releases that will take years before most people will realize how groundbreaking these will be looking back on them in a few years.
Agree. Apple thinks things all the way through.
In user-facing technology as well as development tools and languages.
Just out of principle, I hope they are not compatible with GoogleWallet. Just to spite those a-holes for claiming that crap was the best thing since sliced bread.
AI really needs to do something about these ads that hijack your browser. I clicked this story using my iPhone 6 and was automatically transported to some portal site which then took me to the App Store for me to purchase Madden NFL Mobile.
I usually click on the 'Comments' link on all stories to get directly to the forum. That way I get the story (interesting) and the comments (more interesting) and have had no instances of clicking on an ad by mistake.
I think "customers" want the rewards earned when they charge to their credit card. Retailers trying to develop their own debit system will wake up to that eventually and eat humble pie and enable ApplePay. They will also realize the benefit of quicker transactions resulting in shorter checkout lines. Major retailers already monitor credit card transactions and notify offending companies if their transactions are too slow.
I'm pretty sure people using ApplePay still gets the rewards their CC issuer gives them, like discounts, milage and bonus dollars. After all, the bank knows your CC number, where, when, what and how much you charged. You still get a regular CC statement and bill. It's at the retail level that you might lose any rewards because all the retailer gets is a token for the charge. No CC number or name. But some retailers have apps that will let ApplePay users collect their in store rewards, whenever they pay with ApplePay.
I'm pretty sure people using ApplePay still gets the rewards their CC issuer gives them, like discounts, milage and bonus dollars. After all, the bank knows your CC number, where, when, what and how much you charged. You still get a regular CC statement and bill. It's at the retail level that you might lose any rewards because all the retailer gets is a token for the charge. No CC number or name. But some retailers have apps that will let ApplePay users collect their in store rewards, whenever they pay with ApplePay.
That is what he is saying, people will prefer ApplePay in the long run because it uses your credit cards so you get those perks.
He is saying that MCX and the others that don't use credit cards will not be popular with people because then they won't be getting the perks from their credit card companies for those purchases. MCX works more like a debit card, taking money directly from your checking account, which is what Walmart/Best Buy want because they are trying to avoid paying the credit card companies processing fees. I think MCX might be waking up to this issue though, because I believe I remember reading a story where the CEO says that they could start using credit cards too if that is what customers want.
I'm disappointed that Swift took so long. Microsoft's C# is very similar to it and arrived in 2002:
http://www.kunal-chowdhury.com/2012/07/evolution-of-c-10-50-what-are-new.html
Even if you consider version 2 in 2005 to be comparable, that's still a decade earlier. It was designed by this guy who joined Microsoft in 1996:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg
Swift was designed by this guy who joined Apple in 2005:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lattner
He didn't design Objective-C, which has been around since the 80s but he worked on Objective-C. He may have contributed to Objective-C 2.0:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C#Objective-C_2.0
Half of the app store apps are apparently written in non-native languages but that still means over 500k apps are written in Objective-C. I wish they had been developed in Swift because not only would they perform better from not having users deal with memory management but they'd probably be richer apps because the developer wouldn't have been held back by the language.
Still, at least it's done now and things can move forward from this point but as you say, it won't really be for a few years that the benefit is really seen because thousands of developers are trained in Objective-C and will maintain legacy projects in it. It would be nice if they put an upgrade feature in Xcode that attempted to translate Objective-C projects to Swift. This would be helped by automatically and transparently creating Objective-C wrapper functions between Swift and C++.