Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
By Jim Daly and Kevin Woodward Just hours after Merchant Customer Exchange LLC (MCX), the retailer-backed developer of the CurrentC mobile-payments service, posted a response to reports about some of its members dumping Apple Inc.’s rival Apple Pay service, the company notified customers that “unauthorized third parties” had obtained email …
Read More »MCX Implies Its Ready To Accept General-Purpose Cards, but Questions Remain
By Jim Daly Attempting to do damage control in the wake of an email hack and unfavorable publicity about retailers who want to accept other mobile wallets, the chief executive of the retailer-sponsored Merchant Customer Exchange LLC (MCX) mobile-payments service said Wednesday that MCX is working with general-purpose credit card …
Read More »Issuers’ Apple Pay Pact Assigns Remarkable Authority to Card Networks As Well As Apple
Issuers signing up to have their cards included in the Apple Pay wallet may benefit from all the hype Apple Inc. is generating for the new mobile-payment service. But behind the scenes, the 500 or so financial institutions that have enlisted in the program so far are also signing up …
Read More »Would-Be Apple Pay Users Disappointed When Rite Aid Apparently Turns Off NFC
By Jim Daly As a complex new technology-based service, Apple Inc.’s Apple Pay was certain to hit some speed bumps after it debuted Oct. 20. Sure enough, reports of glitches surfaced, such as about 1,000 double charges on Apple Pay transactions funded by Bank of America Corp. debit cards. But …
Read More »Apple Pay Works, But It Can’t Speed up Lines of Non-Users
The big news about my test today of Apple Pay, the contactless payment scheme for use with Apple Inc. smart phones and tablets, is that there was no big news. It worked. Each transaction on the first day of availability went through quickly, with a notification popping up on …
Read More »Cardtronics’ New Skyscraper ATMs Link a Mobile App With Merchant Rewards
Retail ATM network owner and operator Cardtronics Inc. is testing ATMs as tall as nine feet that offer discounts to consumers when they withdraw cash at stores with Cardtronics machines and then make a purchase using a smart-phone app to access the reward. The ATMs and rewards are part of …
Read More »COMMENTARY: How Passbook Positions Apple to Command—Not Just Align With—the Payments Industry
By Rick Oglesby, Double Diamond Payments Research With Apple Pay now confirmed to launch on Monday, we are closer to seeing the impact it will have on mobile-payments acceptance, technologies, and standards. In the meantime, much of the debate concerning Apple Inc.’s payments venture has missed a crucial point. While …
Read More »Apple Pay Goes Live Monday, As Apple, Samsung Join ETA
The date is set. Apple Inc.’s Apple Pay mobile-payment scheme, now with more than 500 banks supporting it, launches Monday, the Cupertino, Calif.-based company announced Thursday. Apple Pay is a payment scheme that has two components. One, available only in the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, uses a near-field …
Read More »While Smiling on NFC, eBay’s CEO Raises Possibility of PayPal-Apple Pay Link
EBay Inc. chief executive John Donahoe on Wednesday appeared to open a door for PayPal Inc. to serve as a funding source in Apple Inc.’s new Apple Pay mobile-wallet service and to adopt near-field communication to link mobile devices with merchant points of sale. Without saying whether PayPal is actively …
Read More »COMMENTARY: How History Is Repeating Itself With Apple Pay
If you are an issuer of Visa or MasterCard, your deadline for participating in the Apple Pay service set to debut later this month has already passed. It was Tuesday, and issuers didn’t have much time to think about it (let alone perform a technical due diligence or negotiate terms). …
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