Exactly. This just eliminates the need to purchase a Square reader or whatever dongle from other payment vendors.
Already do this at Walmart.
(Of course it's not Apple Pay though.)Yup. No way Apple is doing anything if it does not benefit them financially. They want more and more payments via their tech and by entering in the game with their own credit card they will soon control the money. You will really lock yourself into a tech echo system when the way you handle money is all done through a tech company.
Last time I've seen this used (in-person) was at a farmer's market, pre COVID-19, so we're talking early 2020. I hear it's still used (FWIW). Nice thing is it works on both Android and iOS. Some need adaptors since their phones no longer have headphone jacks. Not a huge deal, but not trivial either.
This is an old fear that stopped (at least in the US) banks from issuing contactless cards in the pre-EMV days, so before 2015 because EMV didn't get widely adopted in the US until that year. Now this iPhone payment API lets a person use an iPhone without a separate reader, but you could always use a wireless reader (keep it in your pocket or something). You must have a merchant account loaded and queue up a payment and tap their card to the reader. The old version you could wirelessly harvest their card numbers and sell the actual card numbers to someone who would make fake cards and run up transactions in stores. But due to EMV they must have a payment queued instead of just taking the card number and running. So now with this, the idea of using an iPhone, with a merchant account, is somewhat plausible as a fraud vector, however the payment networks and providers can "see" patterns in spending that they've not seen before and detect the fraud almost in real time. So the issue is that this is a much less attractive scam than a Bitcoin scam, or some other electronic fraud scam. Most other electronic payments they cannot be reversed once the scammer takes the money and runs.Now criminals can just stand extra close in public in hopes that someone is carrying around their credit cards w/o RFID protection.
Some employees were probably misinformed or ignorant and thought Apple Pay was the only contactless but far from it. If they said they won't "let" you that's equivalent to not "letting" you pay with a credit card. They might "advise" you, hey I think that won't work but if you know you have contactless it should go through no problem.
No it's not that. They could put in contactless and it didn't "require" any new readers to use old cards, the merchants would just use whatever they have already and no one would be affected by the inclusion of contactless even if no one took it. However, there was a big media scare that contactless cards (again in the pre-EMV days) would be harvested wirelessly so banks got scared off from issuing contactless cards. And it's not an unfounded fear in the old version, that let you take the card number and run with it.
And hopefully we get this feature for peer-2-peer payment.
The few banks that had contactless then were pushing it as a feature, one that other banks didn't have. They saw it used internationally, and believe it or not it was very common in Europe. So they thought, hey this is cool that you can tap if the retailer supports it. As you say the retailers didn't adopt contactless by and large, but I remember there were banks that issued the cards with contactless then they actually removed contactless in later cards, before bringing it back in the last few years. In the US at least. And it was consumer fears combined with lack of adoption. Cost is one thing for why they wouldn't adopt it in the first place, but there were some that adopted it initially then scaled it back, and those wouldn't care about cost because they decided to put it in initially.
I can absolutely confirm this is true. It's great living in a country with free medical service, free (cheap) dental service, relatively cheap university education, 28 days minimum statutory paid annual leave (in addition to weekends), workers rights, half-decent food standards and so on. Yup, more communist than China and thankfully so.
Dude, I quoted a guy in this thread talking about criminals tapping your wallet and stealing money from you. The fear was there and must still be there to some extent. How widespread it was I don’t know, I don’t have opinion polling on it. But I remember banks that had contactless removed for basically this reason. They didn’t care about cost when they had it in the first place, they just wanted to avoid bad press.
The Square device is probably dead, but Square as a payment service will be sticking around since this is only a reader replacement, not a processing company replacement. Square should integrate this feature in their app since most cards are contactless now.
Already do this at Walmart.
I've also done this a couple times in Apple Stores in 2016 and 2018. I used Apple Pay with an associate in the middle of the store when buying phone cases. Back then, their phone (or was it an iPod touch?) was in some other gizmo to accept the contactless payment, but still...I didn't need to go up to the checkout. It's an odd feeling walking out the store with an item in your hand without a bag or paper receipt.
I remember how slow my first Garmin GPS device was in 2008, it would take minutes to locate satellites - by that time you'd have parked, pulled out the map out and studied the route yourself. When you finally start driving, it would take you over a mountain pass instead of going around on a highway because the mountain pass route was 100m shorter. Can't say I miss the days of standalone GPS devices.
