Ah, but it's a matter of complete control by a bunch of ethically bankrupt, opaque and greedy crooks, vs complete control by the worlds most competent, customer-minded and technically excellent technology company with a core foundation of transparency, respect for their customers privacy and security and for their peace of mind.
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Apple Lambasts Australian Banks Over Call For iPhone NFC Access
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Ah, but it's a matter of complete control by a bunch of ethically bankrupt, opaque and greedy crooks, vs complete control by the worlds most competent, customer-minded and technically excellent technology company with a core foundation of transparency, respect for their customers privacy and security and for their peace of mind.
If you actually kept up to date on things you would know the 30% fee was reduced to 15%. Also, exactly why do you want Apple to host apps, provide a marketplace, deliver push updates, process payments, etc. for free? Or do you think they are a nonprofit? If you want to give away things, build your own app store and do so. If you want to complain about the $650 device, then build a foundry and start making chips, hire designers to work pro bono, and beg for free marketing, retail, and manufacturing. Apple is a business, and their job is to make money.
That's right, fire the man Steve Jobs hand picked as his personal choice of successor, along with his mind blowingly efficient and adept talents and systems which he has refined and integrated into the heart of Apple for coordinating the supply chain, development/manufacturing processes and product release date stock fulfilment, to mention but a sprinkling of his skills. Oh, and let's fire the rest of them too, for good measure, because that will magically cause "better" products to appear every year to satisfy the spec junkies. Not.
I'm not sure how much you understand about the inner machinations and precisely controlled and highly optimised processes, but I'm certain it could be written on a pinhead.
Apple usually ends up winning these arguments. Remember a few years back Japanese carrier Docomo refused to sell iPhones unless they were able to put their own crapware on them? They were once the most powerful carrier in Japan and always did the "my way or the highway" thing. Then they caved to Apple.
It's a bit rich coming from Apple that competition and security will be compromised if the NFC chip was opened up.
Allowing third parties to access the NFC hardware would not compromise the phone. If banks already use Apples existing Touch-ID API to authenticate user logins with biometric data, then I'm sure Apple can develop a similar API to allow secure access to the NFC chip. Opening up NFC on an iPhone brings far greater possibilities for other contactless technologies like building security, public transport (oyster in UK, OPAL/GO card in Aus), NFC pairing to other devices etc.
Australian banking end user technology is far further advanced than the UK and the US. Australia has had contactless card payments, and NFC enabled mobile payments on Android (and on iOS via an NFC sticker) for years now. ApplePay does not bring anything new to the table in Australia, it just brings some convenience. People will argue that security is a benefit with ApplePays tokenisation and touch ID etc. Until the NFC chip is opened up to 3rd parties, we don't have any comparison to judge how well security has been implemented across the payment process.
The banking apps released by CommBank, Westpac and ANZ are fantastic (NAB does suck) compared to the offerings in the UK and US. They offer things such as cardless ATM withdrawals, payments to others via standard bank transfer / text / facebook, in-app card management (change PIN, lock credit card, increase limit), touch ID authentication, bill payment, the list goes on. The banks in Australia want access to NFC to offer tap & pay functionality on iPhones through their native apps (something that consumers in Aus such as myself have wanted for a long time long before Apple Pay was even rumoured). It will add the final missing piece to the rich functionality already offered by these apps. It will provide choice through competition, and allow users to choose which payment method they would like to use rather than having one pushed onto them.
Allowing third parties to access the NFC hardware would not compromise the phone. If banks already use Apples existing Touch-ID API to authenticate user logins with biometric data, then I'm sure Apple can develop a similar API to allow secure access to the NFC chip. Opening up NFC on an iPhone brings far greater possibilities for other contactless technologies like building security, public transport (oyster in UK, OPAL/GO card in Aus), NFC pairing to other devices etc.
Australian banking end user technology is far further advanced than the UK and the US. Australia has had contactless card payments, and NFC enabled mobile payments on Android (and on iOS via an NFC sticker) for years now. ApplePay does not bring anything new to the table in Australia, it just brings some convenience. People will argue that security is a benefit with ApplePays tokenisation and touch ID etc. Until the NFC chip is opened up to 3rd parties, we don't have any comparison to judge how well security has been implemented across the payment process.
The banking apps released by CommBank, Westpac and ANZ are fantastic (NAB does suck) compared to the offerings in the UK and US. They offer things such as cardless ATM withdrawals, payments to others via standard bank transfer / text / facebook, in-app card management (change PIN, lock credit card, increase limit), touch ID authentication, bill payment, the list goes on. The banks in Australia want access to NFC to offer tap & pay functionality on iPhones through their native apps (something that consumers in Aus such as myself have wanted for a long time long before Apple Pay was even rumoured). It will add the final missing piece to the rich functionality already offered by these apps. It will provide choice through competition, and allow users to choose which payment method they would like to use rather than having one pushed onto them.
Nothing to do with chip cards - has to do with retailers still insisting on swiping the magnetic strip - US banking is so out-of-step with the rest of the world - even the old "eastern" European countries have long passed the magnetic strip cards.
Oh, I'm not saying Apple should give it away. But I am saying that it is a very disruptive piece of technology. Just the act of not touching a card with my bank's name on it multiple times per day will have an effect of distancing my relationship with my bank (which since I don't go to tellers is vastly less already than it was when I used to go to the bank with my Dad as a kid and everyone at the branch knew us by name).
Apple did not build the contactless NFC solution. That was done by others. See below. Their primary invention was to come up with the brilliant idea of preventing us from accessing the EMV applets to use our own credit cards, unless banks paid Apple a fee.
On the contrary, their apps would be EXACTLY like Apple Pay contactless is now.
- Apple does not handle the tokenization.
- Apple did not write the contactless EMV payment code.
- Apple's servers do NOTHING during a contactless payment.
Apple's part in a contactless payment is to provide the app that provides the UI that lets the user set the default payment card and authenticates the user with Touch Id.
A replacement app can easily do EXACTLY the same thing. That's what NFC is all about.
The fees you're talking about are for providing an actual service during a transaction, such as providing the network, transferring funds, providing tokenization services.
Apple's servers do absolutely nothing during a contactless transaction. The CC applets, local acquirer service companies, credit card companies and the banks do it all.
The only reason Apple gets a contactless fee, is because they won't let anyone else register to use the NFC credit card applets in the first place, without paying Apple.
With normal NFC, any app can be set to be woken when the appropriate terminal is close by (payment, transportation, whatever).
Thus any app could register to act exactly like the Apple Pay app does.
In countries like the UK where EMV has been around for a long time, the cost of contactless payment fraud runs about twenty times LESS than the cost of Apple's fee.
This post makes no sense.
The banks already get all the same purchase information, since they are the purchase approvers.
Heck, that's partly why banks were willing to pay Apple... to continue getting this information. Unlike with, say, the original Google Wallet which anonymized our purchase info from the banks.
Of course they do. Moreover, it helps their customers as well, because anything that cuts into their fees means lower award programs for us.
Not to mention that's Apple's fees are a burden on smaller profit institutions such as credit unions.
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TL;DR - so much nonsense has been posted. With normal open NFC, apps can register to start automatically just like the Apple Pay GUI does. And that's all Apple Pay is with contactless payments, a GUI. The real work is done by the NFC applets and all the banking backend systems. Apple invented none of that, and does nothing during a contactless purchase to earn any transaction service fees. If Apple had never been involved, and had originally opened NFC, we'd have had banking apps... and apps like say, an Oyster transportation card... in nearly every country of the world by now.
All this said, where Apple could legitimately earn a fee, is with NON-contactless purchases where their servers ARE involved due to in-app purchasing APIs. However, even that could be done by a bank's app / custom applets if allowed.
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Same thing in Finland, with the exception that we don't even have the one approved option pushed onto us. We're just having to let our NFC hardware sit completely unusable while waiting for the day that may never come. Of course it would be nice to have Apple Pay on my phone and watch, but as that doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon, I'd really like it if the iOS version of my bank's app supported mobile payments like the Android version does.
Being able to pay with my iPhone would be a nice improvement regardless of whether it's through Apple Pay or my bank's app.
And the Canadian banks banded together, just like these 3 Australian banks are trying to - and all that did was delay Apple Pay being in Canada by about a year and a bit. (we should have had it at launch....seriously, contactless payment was already everywhere up here when ApplePay launched) *sigh*
Actually the fraud rate on "pay wave" is jumping in australia. As any purchase under $100 goes through with no checking. It is a growing problem and the criminals are taking advantage of it. The Apple pay process stops this dead.
Agreed, which is why I edited out all the garbage and lies in your useless post.
And because of that "hold-out" I'm betting the rate banks pay for Apple Pay is a mere fraction of what the American Banks are paying. Remember CC rates that can be charged merchants are capped in Canada so anything additional cuts into the bank's profit margin - and profit margins are something that Apple knows all-to-well.
The banks are making lots of money on Interac fees (which is like the wireless carriers and roaming - a straight cash grab - they don't charge each other). I wouldn't say that the Canadian banks got a better deal - Apple already had them over a barrel by giving first exclusivity to Amex. (lots of people ran out and got Amex cards because of this - I'm guessing the banks likely noticed).
We haven't seen any of that in Canada.
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Sorry man, but that's absolute BS ... NO one uses an AMEX card anymore and they're useless for travel in Europe - oh, I take that back ... you can insert them into the room light activator to keep the lights on ... that's about all they're good for in Europe.
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US banks have that stuff in their apps too. Well, BofA does anyway.
They'd like to be able to charge their customers a fee every time they use Apple Pay too. And since they'll probably keep their own apps free of charge to use...yeah.
Your opinion on Amex doesn't exactly mean that there aren't millions of Canadians carrying their cards right now.
I know about a half dozen people that got Amex cards so they could have Apple Pay as soon as they could.
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From http://www.itbusiness.ca/news/at-least-one-person-excited-for-apple-pay-in-canada/60864
"That means there were about 6.44 million Canadians with an iPhone at the end of 2013."
"A 2013 statistic from American Express shows that there were 4.12 million credit cards in Canada."
So, Amex is about 2/3's as popular as the iPhone in Canada (in 2013) - if you can chase down newer stats for both so we have a comparison, have at it.
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I doubt they'd charge customers a fee for using ApplePay. You could argue Apple displays the same behaviour by charging banks for the 'privilege' of using the NFC chip.
Fees and business model aside, my point is Apple are restricting hardware functionality to push their own agenda. It goes against the argument of competition in their response to the ACCC.