What's your point?
Why did you bother to quote the post?
So you can echo the same unoriginal thought that you picked up in media?
I didn't pick this conversation, you did.
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Apple Says 35% of U.S. Merchants Accept Apple Pay
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Why did you bother to quote the post?
So you can echo the same unoriginal thought that you picked up in media?
I didn't pick this conversation, you did.
You picked this conversation with your first post:
My point? That comparing the population of Canada and number of POS terminals to that of the US is stupid. Per capita the number of POS terminals are likely the same or very similar. A roll out shouldn't start a decade later because of the number of terminals.
Still an opinion, therefore meaningless.
Assumption.
Yikes!
Another opinion, again meaningless.
As is your entire post, along with your initial comment. Your opinion, a stupid one at that, is just as meaningless. Yikes indeed.
It _is_ all about numbers. For examples:
- Number of cards. The UK and Canada have on the order of 100 million credit cards each. The US has over a BILLION. That's a huge number to replace.
- Terminals. Canada has like a half million POS terminals. The US, over 10 million.
- Liability regulations are different between regions. In the EU, credit card companies don't really get to pass on fraud costs, whereas in the US, credit card companies simply charge much higher rates to banks and merchants to cover the costs AND make a huge profit. In short, they had every incentive to put out new cards in the EU, and virtually none in the US.
- Detection. US banks also heavily invested in computerized fraud detection back in the 1990s. No other country comes close. Which is why fraud rates in the US were actually pretty low as compared to other places.
- Authorization. US networks also had realtime transaction authorization over comm links for the past several decades, something that didn't exist in the EU until recently (and still doesn't in many places). That alone was a huge incentive for the EU to come up with chip & PIN for offline purchases.
- Number of banks. Finally, the UK and many other countries only have a tiny handful of banks that can decide the course of the entire place. The US, on the other hand, has literally HUNDREDS of banks.
This article from Marche 2016 covers some of the issues:
UK’s Lessons For US Mobile Payments Adoption
"OK, you say, so all we need to do now is hustle up and get contactless POS terminals out there in massive force.
If it were only that easy.
In the U.S., there simply aren’t the same dynamics in play.
Two million contactless terminals today sounds like a great start — until you do the math. There are something like 13 million POS terminals across a massive geography that is the United States, not including mPOS devices.
The U.S. is also a market in which there are 1.2 billion payments cards in circulation, more than 47 billion debit card transactions, more than 26 billion credit card transactions and 209 million adults over the age of 18.
Oh, and something like 14k financial institutions that issue those cards and countless merchant acquirers and ISOs all hawking merchants to deploy new terminals.
It’s a whole lot harder to wrangle this ecosystem to the ground given the diversity of merchants and the engrained plastic card habits honed by consumers over the last 50 or so years."
All excellent points, and I do agree. Though they did wait a decade before they started making the switch.
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Agreed here. I do feel though like they waited much longer than they needed to start moving forward. Not saying that all POS terminals and cards needed to be changed at once, or at the same time as other locations, but until very recently they didn't seem to be making any moves at all. I guess a big reason there was the excellent fraud detection they seemed to be using, and the liability that changed in september 2015 (don't remember the exact details there).
I think the timing of the switch was up to the credit card companies more than anyone else.
Especially Visa, who pretty much set out the time frame for everything. Judging from their documents, they wanted to first do other, smaller countries, to get a feel for what did and didn't work.
Various US banks and merchants had tried chip and contactless cards over the years, but without the backing of MC / Visa / AMEX / Discover, they never caught on.
In short, the delay was deliberate.
Interesting. Perhaps the smaller set of banks in Canada made that easier as well.
Until you can go into a majority of places and pay with Apple Pay, AP is a failure. Whose failure? That is just fact tangled with fiction (or opinion).
The vision that Apple laid out was just not that good for retailers/bank/CC companies... The very people Apple needed on their side to make this work.
My speculation is that if Apple never went for that tiny bit of fee collection and offered at least anonymized shopping data, Apple Pay would be twice the "size".
The vision that Apple laid out was just not that good for retailers/bank/CC companies... The very people Apple needed on their side to make this work.
My speculation is that if Apple never went for that tiny bit of fee collection and offered at least anonymized shopping data, Apple Pay would be twice the "size".
Depends on the country. In the US, Apple convinced the banks well enough (hence why you're likely able to use AP with at least one of your cards), but retailers really hate the fact that they have to pay Visa anything and thus don't want to make card use any easier than it is. Elsewhere, it's the opposite: banks don't want to pay Apple anything while retailers don't care either way.
Also, your suggestion may help in other countries but I doubt retailers in the US would be any more open to whole idea.
Still prefer plastic since it doesn't run out of battery and is resilient to being dropped unlike an expensive phone but Samsung MST is leading the pay as far as acceptance pretty much everywhere. If I do use electronic payment it'll be a Samsung Gear S3 Frontier watch untethered from phone with built-in LTE.