Cards supported by Apple Pay now reflect 90% of card transaction volume in US
On Tuesday Apple announced that ten new banks have agreed to work with Apple Pay to offer credit card support. With those additions, plus the recent additions of SunTrust, Barclaycard, and USAA banks, Apple Pay now accepts credit cards that represent about 90 percent of US credit card transaction volume, according to the New York Times.
That number bodes well for Apple and its nascent mobile payment platform that launched in October of this year. The service lets users buy goods at NFC-enabled terminals in brick-and-mortar stores, as well as pay with a single tap in the iTunes store and in other compatible apps.
The challenge for the adoption of mobile payments platforms like Apple Pay and Google Wallet, which debuted three years prior to Apple Pay’s announcement but failed to gain popular traction, is that the platform developers must build an entire ecosystem—from making sure banks will support the platform and let their users upload cards to it, to making sure that NFC-enabled terminals are in enough retailer checkout counters to make it worthwhile for customers to remember to pull out their phones to pay rather than their credit cards. Apple Pay gained a lot from the groundwork that Google Wallet laid when it pushed mobile payments years ago, and Google gained a lot from the work that MasterCard did with PayPass. Still, even the most bullish analysts currently predict that by the end of 2015, only 25 percent of retail terminals in the US will be NFC-enabled.
