Apple Pay gains 30 more US banks amid wait for more retail chains

AppleInsider · May 17, 2016 9:50PM

Apple on Tuesday updated the roster of U.S. banks supporting Apple Pay with another 30 entries, while shoppers continued to wait for more retail partners to come onboard.

As is now common, the new banks are primarily small-scale institutions dedicated to a particular state, county, city, or employer. One of these, for example, is the San Diego Firefighters Federal Credit Union, which serves only the city's firefighters and their families.

A notable change is that the University of Wisconsin Credit Union is now on the list as "UW Credit Union" instead of its full name. In its place is the University of Toledo Federal Credit Union.

The full list of additions includes:

Alabama State Employees Credit Union
American National Bank
Bank of the South
Cabrillo Credit Union
California Credit Union
Classic Federal Credit Union
Denali Federal Credit Union
Dort Federal Credit Union
First Federal Community Bank
First Green Bank
First National Bank of Catlin
First Oklahoma Federal Credit Union
First US Bank
FMBank
Gerber Federal Credit Union
MassMutual Federal Credit Union
Members Source Credit Union
Morris County National Bank
Muna Federal Credit Union
Rocky Mountain Law Enforcement Federal Credit Union
Sabine Federal Credit Union
San Diego Firefighters Federal Credit Union
Scott Credit Union
Security National Bank of Omaha
Sound Credit Union
Standing Stone Bank
UW Credit Union
Vista Bank
Webster Bank
Workers Credit Union

U.S. merchants have slowly signed on since Apple Pay launched in October 2014. A number of additions have been promised for 2016, like Chili's, Chick-fil-A, Dunkin' Donuts, and JCPenney, but most of these have yet to happen, and some retail chains that signed on a long time ago -- Anthropologie and Forever 21 -- are still sitting on Apple's "coming soon" list.

valueanalyst · May 17, 2016 9:55PM

It baffles me that Apple is focused on adding more banks when CLEARLY the roadblock in front of Apple Pay is lack of vendor support. When can I leave my cards home?

rob53 · May 17, 2016 10:07PM

ValueAnalyst said:

It baffles me that Apple is focused on adding more banks when CLEARLY the roadblock in front of Apple Pay is lack of vendor support. When can I leave my cards home?

It's actually merchant support. I was at Costco this morning asking about the conversion from Amex to Citibank and asked about ApplePay and chipped cards. Costco takes neither, which surprised about not using chipped cards. Of course I wasn't talking to anyone who really knows anything other than discussing the credit card conversion but she said she didn't want to use SamsungPay on her Galaxy. I tried explaining the benefits of either one and she quickly shut down, she wasn't ready to even try and understand something other than swiping a card. Expand this to the other millions of people who are technically challenged (like politicians, police, and judges) and you see the situation Apple is in. It's relatively easy for Apple to get banks to get on board because the backend part of ApplePay is straightforward. It's the merchant end that's causing issues, mainly because merchants rarely want to spend any money on IT and once something is working, they don't want to pay to change it. I've given up worrying about Home Depot ever turning NFC back on and am simply happy when I find a store that's tech savvy enough (I hate this term) to know how to turn it on and what it means to their customers.

daye · May 17, 2016 10:38PM

Apple should persuade more retailers to accept Apple Pay. Apple should make P2P /ATM on Apple Pay.

walter77 · May 17, 2016 10:48PM

I've been using Apple pay at Dunkin' Donuts since May 1...

rogifan_new · May 17, 2016 10:50PM

The lack of broader merchant support is a failure of Pay IMO. I'm lucky that my local grocery store supports it. And yea for Whole Foods, Trader Joes and Panarw but that's about it.

onlyhope · May 17, 2016 10:51PM

I simply tell the merchants I shop at that, "...it's important to ME that you offer  Pay payment as a check-out option." Your competition down the street does.

eightzero · May 17, 2016 11:03PM

onlyhope said:

I simply tell the merchants I shop at that, "...it's important to ME that you offer  Pay payment as a check-out option." Your competition down the street does.

I do this too, but usually the checkout person has exactly no interest. Almost always I get a shrug. Although occasionally I get an invitation to a survey on the receipt. I put my comment there, along with "and my checker didn't seem to care."

One of the funny experiences I had was at a convenience store. I noticed the terminal had the NFC logo on it. I said to the checker (clearly the owner of this little ma/pa operation) "oh, you take apple pay." He said, "no. no chip reader. use swipe..." and before he got the words out, I clicked by Apple watch...*ding* approved. He was dumbfounded. He actually had no idea his machine could do that.

mrmiyamoto · May 17, 2016 11:04PM

It's a lot better in Canada where Apple Pay works with any terminal equipped to handle Interac Flash, and a growing number of them are.

redstater · May 17, 2016 11:16PM

daye said:

Apple should persuade more retailers to accept Apple Pay. Apple should make P2P /ATM on Apple Pay.

And how are they going to do that? Apple would be asking the retailers to spend millions (and for larger ones, billions) in new hardware that they will have to roll out and support, when they will get no more money from it than they already are. Apple Pay - and mobile payments generally - only benefit Apple (and Google) and the banks. They do not increase profits for the retailers, so why bother? "Your competition down the street does." That only works if it is a mom-and-pop shop. Usually the competition will be a regional or national chain. And in any case, you are talking about the small percentage of the population that A) owns an iPhone 6, 6s or an Apple Watch,

has signed up for Apple Pay and C) wants to use Apple Pay any given day and D) is motivated to choose their retailer over who gives them the opportunity to pay with their phone or watch instead of paying with their credit card like they have all their previous life. That is going to be, like 10 people per store MAYBE? They are willing to give that up in order to avoid the expense of buying, installing and supporting the new equipment. Until large retailers give up on MCX or their own proprietary mobile payment apps - because stores want to lock their own consumers in AND collect data for their own advertising campaigns - you may not see any real action on Apple Pay.

lkrupp · May 17, 2016 11:19PM

rogifan_new said:

The lack of broader merchant support is a failure of Pay IMO. I'm lucky that my local grocery store supports it. And yea for Whole Foods, Trader Joes and Panarw but that's about it.

And why, pray tell, is Pay itself at fault and a failure? What is it that merchants want that they can’t get with Pay? Can they get it with other NFC payment systems? Claiming something is a failure is one thing. Providing an answer is more difficult than running your mouth off. Does anybody even know what Samsung Pay, Google Pay, Google Wallet are?

foggyhill · May 17, 2016 11:36PM

ValueAnalyst said:

It baffles me that Apple is focused on adding more banks when CLEARLY the roadblock in front of Apple Pay is lack of vendor support. When can I leave my cards home?

The roadblock is the crappy disjointed way payment is organized in the US.

Even when VISA forced them to covert to Chip and signature and likely every new terminal coming with a NFC chip (even if its not activated), they still choose the worse most backward system possible!! It will take another god damn security breach for people to wake up and screem at their dumbass retailers.

In two years, Apple pay will likely work in most of Europe, China, Canada, Australia and many places in Asia, the Americas and still the US will be revel in being as backward as ass.

edited May 2016

idrey · May 17, 2016 11:58PM

ValueAnalyst said:

It baffles me that Apple is focused on adding more banks when CLEARLY the roadblock in front of Apple Pay is lack of vendor support. When can I leave my cards home?

Merchants deal directly with the banks. So it makes sense to get the banks on board to then get the merchants.

hawkpride147 · May 18, 2016 12:10AM

rob53 said:

ValueAnalyst said:

It baffles me that Apple is focused on adding more banks when CLEARLY the roadblock in front of Apple Pay is lack of vendor support. When can I leave my cards home?

It's actually merchant support. I was at Costco this morning asking about the conversion from Amex to Citibank and asked about ApplePay and chipped cards. Costco takes neither, which surprised about not using chipped cards. Of course I wasn't talking to anyone who really knows anything other than discussing the credit card conversion but she said she didn't want to use SamsungPay on her Galaxy. I tried explaining the benefits of either one and she quickly shut down, she wasn't ready to even try and understand something other than swiping a card. Expand this to the other millions of people who are technically challenged (like politicians, police, and judges) and you see the situation Apple is in. It's relatively easy for Apple to get banks to get on board because the backend part of ApplePay is straightforward. It's the merchant end that's causing issues, mainly because merchants rarely want to spend any money on IT and once something is working, they don't want to pay to change it. I've given up worrying about Home Depot ever turning NFC back on and am simply happy when I find a store that's tech savvy enough (I hate this term) to know how to turn it on and what it means to their customers.

It is stupidity on their part. It is rather simple to turn it on provided you have a modern payment terminal. What surprises me most are grocery stores that accept WIC but not chip cards. Any merchant with a Verifone MX915/925 (the most common payment terminal in use) can accept both chip and NFC payments. To not do so is lazy. I do retail technology for a small chain of bookstores and it was rather easy to enable.

valueanalyst · May 18, 2016 12:35AM

redstater said:

daye said:

Apple should persuade more retailers to accept Apple Pay. Apple should make P2P /ATM on Apple Pay.

And how are they going to do that? Apple would be asking the retailers to spend millions (and for larger ones, billions) in new hardware that they will have to roll out and support, when they will get no more money from it than they already are. Apple Pay - and mobile payments generally - only benefit Apple (and Google) and the banks. They do not increase profits for the retailers, so why bother? "Your competition down the street does." That only works if it is a mom-and-pop shop. Usually the competition will be a regional or national chain. And in any case, you are talking about the small percentage of the population that A) owns an iPhone 6, 6s or an Apple Watch, has signed up for Apple Pay and C) wants to use Apple Pay any given day and D) is motivated to choose their retailer over who gives them the opportunity to pay with their phone or watch instead of paying with their credit card like they have all their previous life. That is going to be, like 10 people per store MAYBE? They are willing to give that up in order to avoid the expense of buying, installing and supporting the new equipment. Until large retailers give up on MCX or their own proprietary mobile payment apps - because stores want to lock their own consumers in AND collect data for their own advertising campaigns - you may not see any real action on Apple Pay.

I'm not sure if the "millions" comment is correct. Square offers a $50 product that accepts Apple Pay, and I'm sure there are even cheaper ways to get it done. I would assume merchants would care about their customers' satisfaction in exchange for $50.

in addition, in just a few months, hundreds of millions of people will have upgraded to 6, 6S, 7, and SE and Apple Watch and Apple Watch S. We're not talking about just 10 people per store. And to top it off, these hundreds of millions of people are the top spenders in the world...

ny1822 · May 18, 2016 1:01AM

Still waiting for peer to peer payments and browser payments....I'm done using PayPal

http://iphone.appleinsider.com/articles/16/01/21/munster-apple-pay-distribution-low-but-peer-to-peer-and-in-browser-payments-to-goose-adoption-in-2016

rogifan_new · May 18, 2016 1:20AM

lkrupp said:

rogifan_new said:

The lack of broader merchant support is a failure of Pay IMO. I'm lucky that my local grocery store supports it. And yea for Whole Foods, Trader Joes and Panarw but that's about it.

And why, pray tell, is Pay itself at fault and a failure? What is it that merchants want that they can’t get with Pay? Can they get it with other NFC payment systems? Claiming something is a failure is one thing. Providing an answer is more difficult than running your mouth off. Does anybody even know what Samsung Pay, Google Pay, Google Wallet are?

Perhaps Apple needs to treat merchants as if they were China.

cali · May 18, 2016 3:19AM

....and people thought my Apple subsidized POS systems idea was bad. It would have been paying off really well by now.

canadan · May 18, 2016 3:26AM

I've been using it here in Toronto for all my purchases since I set it up on my iPhone/Apple watch last week and we pretty much have tap to pay everywhere, there are some places that don't have it but they are few and far between in my experience. I pretty much use it everywhere now with the watch and love it. Public transit, grocery stores, pharmacy chains, almost every shopping mall store, and most small retailers as well, paradise! I didn't realize how widely available tap and pay is here until now. I really hope it improves in the US, fingers crossed.

tomkarl · May 18, 2016 3:28AM

Sorry to be a bit off topic, but I have to ask the AI editors something that's bothered me for a long time:

Why is it that the list of banks in the lead article contains no formatting or line breaks but if you go into the forum comments the list is bulleted and nicely formatted?

A minor annoyance but bothersome nonetheless.

anantksundaram · May 18, 2016 3:48AM

onlyhope said:

I simply tell the merchants I shop at that, "...it's important to ME that you offer  Pay payment as a check-out option." Your competition down the street does.

Yeah, and some poor sap on minimum wage on the customer front lines of a mega-corp's retail outlet -- e.g., my local CVS -- has the power to send that up the chain to make a difference?

All you're really doing is hassling some powerless person.

Apple Pay gains 30 more US banks amid wait for more retail chains

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