Apple is propping up a fundamentally broken payments industry

Re:Apple is propping up a fundamentally broken payments indu... by mnglkhn2 on Friday September 12, 2014 @12:30PM (#8308914)

I thought that the big issue with the current system is that every transaction uses the whole set of identifiable info (name, cc number, exp date, etc). Credit cards with chips solve the issue, but in US it would take costly upgrades across the whole ecosystem.

Apple Pay comes as a layer on top the existing system, bringing primarily the same level of security as the chip-based cards.

Of course, it is a solution that assumes you have an iPhone 6, which is not a cheap and accessible thing for everybody, and that the merchant has the reader. The large/high-end merchants will have no issues moving to NFC payments and it will make Apple Pay a viable solution.

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Re:Apple is propping up a fundamentally broken payments indu... by esturk on Friday September 12, 2014 @03:08PM (#8309812)

> and that the merchant has the reader.

Starting next October (2015), the liability of fraud will shift from the issuing bank to the merchant/card issuer. So Apple is ripe to take advantage of this because most (I assume) merchants will want customers to use Credit+chip or Mobile NFC because they will lessen the risk of someone committing fraud with a stolen CC. This will mean upgrades across the nation. Even card issuers like Walmart will want all its stores to upgrade.

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Re:Apple is propping up a fundamentally broken payments indu... by ryanhuff on Friday September 12, 2014 @12:59PM (#8309073)

The backend rails are intended to be agnostic. Sure, Apple's front-end (secure store, touch id, etc) is unique, but the same tokenization process that Apple Pay will use will be available to Google and others.

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