As right as you are about the American market, it's extremely annoying that the rest of the world doesn't get to use services like Google Wallet and Apple Pay. In Canada, I've been tapping to pay for years, yet there are no popular 3rd party services to use my phone for paying.

So sure, it'll be stillborn in the US. But I don't give a crap about the US, you guys get enough of the cool stuff. This is a sweet deal for every other country with the infrastructure in place. This is a great idea for those countries, and definitely not a waste of effort in my eyes.

I will admit that while scanning through the content on the site again, I missed an important piece of wording that initially formulated half of my opinion here.

It is important to note that it does say World-wide. If they are poised to launch in other countries besides the US then I retract my statement about it being a waste.

However, I've seen much of this financial tech go straight to US for launch. If its NFC it's dead. Going that route, they may be out of business before they can even launch it elsewhere.

Wasn't there recently some kind of legislation in the US that encouraged the adoption of NFC-based terminals, which was one of the main drivers behind the release of Apple Pay in the first place? I remember reading about it somewhere in the middle of a Google Wallet vs Apple Pay flamewar.

I agree that launching in the US is a bad idea for the reasons you mention, and I'm hopeful that more companies try starting outside of the US. The potential is huge, and there is a sizeable market for this kind of thing that is unfortunately overlooked by most.

US is one of the last markets worldwide to adopt NFC. In Australia, 70-75% of all supermarket transactions are now contactless, and 47% of all point of sale card payments:

http://www.zdnet.com/article/tapping-away-at-checkout-with-a...

Edit: I missed that this product requires a smartphone. I thought it was a PayPass enabled card similar to Coinjar Swipe, that lets you spend Bitcoin in Australian stores: https://blog.coinjar.com/2015/02/26/now-every-australian-bus...

It may not be big in the US market yet, but I can tell you for sure - here in the UK, it's huge. Almost all transactions I do in chain stores are done with contactless.

I believe it's a similar story in Canada.

Keep in mind that in the US chip-and-pin is still virtually unknown.

Exactly. It will come along, and soon. And while all the terminals are being upgraded to support ICC, most of them are being bundled with NFC.

I'm not hopeful that contactless will take-off in the US either.

The USA is finally moving to catch up with the rest of the world in terms of using smart cards rather than the archaic mag-stripe, as the liability shift that took place in Europe 10 years ago is swinging into force now.

But it might be too late, and you might be right, the likes of ApplePay may well take over entirely in the USA.

Elsewhere, where Apple have less market share this may not be true, and the US may end up in a ghetto of 1, again, with its own market dynamics and tech that's not applicable in the rest of the world.

Apple Pay and contactless are both the same technology & same standards. If you support one, it's essentially trivial to support the other. Additionally if you support NFC, it isn't much more to support ICC as well.

>> Apple Pay and contactless are both the same technology & same standards. If you support one, it's essentially trivial to support the other

Ah, this I didn't know, thanks.

>> Additionally if you support NFC, it isn't much more to support ICC as well.

It's different hardware. Historically the hardware has been more likely to support ICC/EMV and not NFC, but if the US is actually ever going to do a big EMV rollout then (were I the I the sort of person in charge of buying the equipment) it makes sense to go for both.

I'm sort-of interested in the Apple Pay thing now. (only sort-of, I find payments tech mostly to be incredibly boring). I've not worked on NFC/EMV contactless kernels but I understand that, unlike with the physical chip versions, you tend to need at least some amount of custom code for each card scheme. This has been put down to the schemes not pulling together quite so well this time around.

What about the advent of current technology that Samsung recently acquired, Looppay (MST), that uses a magentic tokenization to be able to complete transactions? These are useful and readily accessible with 90% of POS terminals that read the magnetic stripe on your credit card. It if different from the RFID-based NFC but it can be used compatible as current POS systems transfer to EMV-updated systems that will also support NFC transactions. This MST technology is mostly srpead to Japan and not neccessarily in the US though our current terminals are already ready to accept these payments.

> This product will be stillborn in the U.S. as NFC terminals are fairly rare

Meanwhile in Australia, over 70% of CC purchases at supermarkets (and 50% overall) under $100 are contactless, signatures have been phased out (PIN is required for transactions), and Chip & PIN cards have been the norm for 5+ years.

> 43% of people who attempt to use ApplePay at a terminal that supports it fail and the clerk provides no meaningful assistance.

Do you have a source for this? I'm honestly interested in reading more about this and where this number comes from.

Edit: Close from memory but it was 42% couldn't get help from a clerk, 47% were denied by a participating merchant and the source article is here: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/04/like-all-mobile-wallets...

Thanks!