He's not talking about NFC. He is talking about the payment technology that Apple developed that is vastly superior to NFC. NFC is just the technology that's used for transmitting the token payment data.
What technology are you talking about?
Apple didn't develop the EMV tokenization, NFC payments, terminals or backend systems. The credit card companies and banks did.
For contactless payments, Apple simply did a little UI app that asks for a passcode or fingerprint. The same action that any other wallet app could do if it had access to NFC.
Apple may one day open NFC further. It took a year before they allowed TouchID to work for apps.
However, when you currently hold your iPhone to an active payment terminal, the Apple Wallet app opens. Are these banks expecting that their app should open with priority over Apple Wallet? Dreamers.
Yet that's exactly how NFC is supposed to work... open the app registered for that NFC transaction (whether it's a payment or bus ticket or whatever).
If Apple gave access and the banks developed their apps, when something goes wrong do the banks blame Apple and Apple blame the banks? This is why end-to-end is better, Apple takes responsibility.
Apple does not take responsibility if the transaction is stolen. The merchant, credit card companies and banks do.
That's because Apple did not write nor does it own the transaction code, nor any of the backend systems used during a contactless transaction.
The actual NFC payment itself is all done by the Java applets in the Secure Element, which are EMV compliant applets written by the credit card companies.
If Apple wants to upgrade their software do they have to ask these banks if it's ok? Like if all these banks have their apps ready to upgrade?
That's no different than the situation now:
Of course Apple doesn't have to do that now so why would they put themselves in that situation?
Remember when Discover came onboard after a year? It required an iOS update to install the Discover applet in the Secure Element. That's because Apple wanted to control access.
Maybe these banks think they set up all these eftpos terminals and shouldn't be paying Apple for transactions through them? Well maybe. (But actually the retailer pays for the terminals.)
Exactly. The banks see no reason to pay Apple even a fee for doing nothing during a transaction, much less a percentage.
OTOH, acquirers, networks and banks actually do something to earn their percentage.
But next month all this changes. Because next month ApplePay comes to web for Mac and iOS and then Apple has many more million 'terminals' than the banks.
Now, web based is a different animal. If Apple's servers are involved, then yes they then deserve at least a flat fee.
And yet even then, banks have their own web based authentication methods now, so again they would see no reason to be forced to pay Apple.
Good. I mean, one of the things this "cartel" wants to do is charge people to use Apple Pay. (I imagine their own app would be free to use if Apple was forced to allow access to the NFC chip.)
True, they want the option to pass on the extra cost of paying Apple if one of their customers wishes to use Apple Pay. Then consumers would easily see why banks don't love it.
The choice is, do you let your local bank use the transaction fee so it can do things like give you awards? Or do you give Apple the money to take out of country and stash away? Over time, Apple Pay would siphon millions out of Australia.
