I was in Munich earlier in the year and it was damn near impossible to buy a train ticket because of the ridiculous cultural dislike of plastic cards to pay for things!
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Apple Partnering With American Express on iPhone Mobile Payments Initiative [Updated]
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I was in Munich earlier in the year and it was damn near impossible to buy a train ticket because of the ridiculous cultural dislike of plastic cards to pay for things!
That's why Germany is one of the greatest economies in the world. They pay for things they can afford, credit cards are not welcome there.
I was in Germany last month and it was ridiculously easy to buy a train ticket on the DB iPhone app, using my Visa card. Never needed a paper ticket or cash.
However, the experience could be improved with NFC. Scanning 2D bar codes to validate tickets always seems a bit slow and clunky to me.
You didn't clearly specify anything.
My app is broken. I call it time travel posting. It's meant to post a reply on the date specified. Example I'm writing this one today 1st September and set a time of 21 days 19hrs. It'll appear 22nd September. Or instantly
Close to any of the old Byte Magazine crew in Peterborough? If there is a company that was on top of the tech scene and did not shift to the web right, they were it. Still have my final issue from '98.
NFC or "touch payments" are not taking off as much as anticipated. Where NFC is really doing well is security access.
Many office buildings and other sequre environments have replaced mechanical keys with access cards that you keep in your wallet or on your ID to open a door.
I'd be hesitant to may payments with my iPhone but I have no problem using it to get into my home, car or office.
yes but only about 17 % of all germans use a credit card to buy stuff. thats what i was actually going for. the option may be there but no ones using it
Where is here? I hope to god it’s not the UK or the US being used as an example of a place you are at/would rather be. Germany is a lovely place. Have lived there a while back.
As for Amex, in the UK it’s about as much use as an ejector seat in a helicopter.
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The trouble is most buildings of that type Im sure would not even consider letting you use your own device to do things like get access to secure areas.
Your phone that they have no control over granting access to their server room .?
Hi, hallo.
I'm Swiss and well I can somehow agree with you but I have a prepaid credit card... I put a "stoleable" amount on it and if a Chinese site decide to rob me then fine I lost the amount I can afford. For sure i'think I may claim and prove that it wasn't me spending 2000$ in a car in China but well I like to keep the control.
So I agree and disagree with you, some people doesn't know to manage their money and cannot/ won't face the reality that with a salary of 2000$ you cannot afford a car costing 200'000$ even if you pay 1000$ a month... In Switzerland we have a law to forbid to let people take new credits is they have already debts, this is in order to avoid dramatic situation.
So well credit cards can be good and evil, this is just depending how you decide to manage it.
That's interesting. So you guys don't have credit scores in Germany? How do you determine who gets loans (mortgages, etc.) and what rate to charge them?
If no one is borrowing, you have no history of their likelihood to repay debts.
I hope you are aware that the people responsible for that past are largely dead and punished? In addition I hope you are aware that most countries have some kind of similar element in their history: United States (Indians), Turkey (Armenians) and the list goes on and on. To base your traveling decisions on what people (most of which are dead) did in the past would limit your travel options to Greenland and the North Pole, but I guess you didn't do enough research for that. A very short sighted and naive world view you have.----------
The credit history in Germany and many other countries is built by negative events, meaning that only instances where debts are NOT paid in time or at all are reported.
There is no record kept of debts that are paid on time to build a record of good behavior. Especially in Germany the privacy authority would be against that.
If someone uses a credit card in the UK, they have to enter a pin number or the transaction won't go through. Don't you have this in the states?
ATM cards are made of plastic too and I could use my Dutch ING one everywhere in Germany. There's a dislike in parts of Europe to buy a pack of milk on credit like Americans have a tendency of doing. IMO with good reason.
I'm speaking from Australia, but it seems it works the same as in Canada - you can pay in three ways (with your credit or bank debit card):
1. Swipe the magnetic strip and key in your pin
2. Insert your card into the chip-reader slot and key in your pin (cards that have chips will normally be rejected if you try and swipe their mag stripe)
3. For small purchases, you can 'paywave'/'paypass' by tapping your card on the unit, and the transaction is conducted via NFC and no PIN is required.
The Commonwealth Bank in Australia provides NFC stickers that you can stick on your phone (or whatever) in order to use that to pay for things in conjunction with an iOS/Android app:
If this functionality were built into the iPhone 6 (as it sounds like it is), that will be a killer feature, and I will go from 90% sure I'm going to buy one to 100%.
Good question!
I guess that's because every transaction is effectively a money transfer, and that takes more time (couple of days) to happen.. But for real-life action that shouldn't be an issue especially since everyone is already doing it.
Point being: I'd love to being able to store any card's information on the phone, not just the credit's, especially since I find the latter is mostly used on the net and the former in face-to-face transactions.
In countries with Chip & PIN cards servers bring a wireless terminal to the table to complete the transaction (as you need to enter your PIN). Your card never leaves your sight so the server can't copy account info. I assume these wireless terminals could be made to accept NFC (apparently Apple's in store portable terminals now do).
Wish we had those stickers here, as we do have 'contactless payment' for small amounts of money - the same as Paywave by the sounds of it.
Then again, with the iPhone 6 we hopefully won't need them.
Sure, there are a lot of dumb americans who cant manage their finances. And we'd be better off if that was the same mentality here. But on the plus side we have the likes of NewEgg, and Amazon, and iTunes App Store... How do you buy online?
I think your troubles started because you didn't have a TRUE chip & pin credit card - plus Europe doesn't accept NA bank debit cards - at least I haven't found anyplace that does AND I'm in Europe a lot.
NOT true for NFC payments.
The transaction limit for an NFC payment in the UK, without having to enter a pin, is £20, however. Anything over that and you currently have to use Chip & Pin.
I have noted Mr. Bushido's quotes, and I respect the German way of handling money. When I told my (born in Berlin, emigrated in 1957) grandparents that I got a credit card, I thought they'd be happy, but no...
Anyway, there is one other point that can be made, and that is that with new technology, there is an adoption period. Apple simply releasing the technology doesn't make it accepted, and used, by all:
The iPhone wasn't the first smartphone. I've had them since 2002, where Microsoft simply copied the "start" menu to the phones. In the 5-6 years until the iPhone was released and made them "cool", I was using a niche product.
The Internet wasn't widely used, even in 1995. We had BBS, Usenet, and FIDOnet for communication. If we needed a driver (I was a PC user back then), it was dial in to the supplier's BBS, and download it). By 2000, only 43% of US households had it, and even in 2012, only 28% have broadband (high speed) Internet in their homes. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_United_States)
Even owning a computer wasn't wide back then, and it's surprisingly low now (in 2012...) in 1981, when I got my first TRS-80 Color Computer, I was one of <8.2% (stats only go to 1984, and I assumed it was lower 3 years earlier), and even now (2012), it's only 79%. (source: http://www.census.gov/hhes/computer/files/2012/Computer_Use_Infographic_FINAL.pdf)
Lastly (I know we're supposed to only use three points in the thesis argument, but this speaks to laying the foundation for things...) IP v4 has been around for 33 years, and has been set to be replaced by IPv6, which is 16 years old now, with a whopping 4% of Internet traffic. IPv4 is robust enough to handle the Internet, and when we go to IPv6, the early adopters will pay the premium (remember routers for $300?, now given freely for signing up), and eventually, we'll be using IPv6, until IPv8 will use 1024 bit addressing, and the entire universe will have an IP address. (joke, folks).
So, what I'm trying to say is that you're right. Based on you and Mr. Bushido's observations, Germany may not be the ideal test bed for coupling an iPhone with a credit card.
The other point is that things start out slow, and proliferate from there. Apple needs to lay the foundation for these transactions, and this is the start. In 2016, we'll probably be using the iPhone for 10-30% of the transactions, and it will seem commonplace. By 2018, I predict, the number will go to 30-60%, and by 2020, it'll be closer to 70%., at least in the US.
Lastly, I apologize for mocking you in the dates thing. It's a rookie mistake on my part, thinking that things I say in real life translate over to the written word. IRL, my voice inflection and delivery let the person know that we're having a spirited discussion, and saying those things that I did would have us laughing instead of making it me challenging your integrity in these forums. I am sorry for doing that.
In the US, debit cards do require a PIN.
Credit cards only require a signature (and usually only for purchases over about $20... and no signature at all for gasoline purchases at the pump).
In fact, apparently worried that Americans will not take kindly to PINs for credit cards, the initial switch to EMV in the US will be Chip & Signature instead of the Chip & PIN used everywhere else.
It could've been prevented by using any NFC smartphone payment. (Not to mention not standing so close to the lady in front of him - ahem.)
In the linked story, an astute clerk noticed that a woman's purchase was automatically paid by the Visa payWave card of a man standing in line behind her.
Very likely this was an old style payWave RFID card.... which can work up to about three feet away, versus the couple of inches of a modern EMV card or NFC smartphone.
That's a pretty clever combination of older technologies. At first you think the app and the card are directly used together, but they're not.
The card is simply a Mastercard PayPass, which works standalone. But they allow the customer to enable/disable the card at the bank's servers at any time, via the CommBank mobile app that runs on your smartphone.
By allowing the customer to easily switch it "on/off", they help avoid the problem of unintentional readings or remote thefts... plus they made even non-NFC phone owners feel empowered.
Even better, it still works even if the phone is dead! (As long as the last thing you did was enable the card, of course.)
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Good luck using that thing in Brooklyn. Shocking how many places in NYC don't bother with AmEx. Actually seems to be a trend in major cities nationwide because their fees are higher.
