tulkas

EsquireCats said:

I'm glad that working with Amex has seemingly been a win-win scenario for Apple and Amex. This has effectively forced stagnant banks into moving to the much more secure and private token system. (The bank's only reason not to support Apple Pay was to protect their transaction fees.)

Every industry seems to fear Apple's involvement, but the net effect for consumers has always been the same: more choice, better security/privacy and better services by leveraging technology. What some of these companies fail to realise is that blocking a new technology doesn't make it go away, it just opens the door to competitors.

I can say confidently that the fractional loss in transaction fees for supporting Apple Pay and similar services is far smaller than the fees and capital lost by customers who switched to competitors. (I for one switched credit cards to take advantage of the convenience of Apple Pay.)

Well, to be fair, the banks were already working on their own tokenization services, which just like Apple's is based on the EMV spec. Apple Pay may have prompted them to accelerate their development. Apple and Interac have both acknowledged that a big part, in fact the main part, of the 1.5 years delay was the banks insistence that Apple Pay use the Interac tokenization service even though Apple already had as good or better on their own. And while the banks probably did put up a fight over the fees, then ended up agreeing to very similar fees to what the US banks originally signed on for. Initially they will also pay the 15 cents/$100, but it decreases after a certain threshold.