I wonder what is going to happen with "Beam" they are all developing, to spite Apple Pay.
"Beem It" is more of a big middle finger to the whole Australian banking industry that just spent billions of dollars developing the New Payments Platform (NPP)/PayID/Osko.
Including the three banks that are involved with Beem It, Commonwealth, NAB and Westpac, Who funnily enough are dragging their feet when it comes to the rollout of the NPP and industry based NPP services.
Funnily enough the only industry using "Beem It" appears to be a small segment of the sex worker industry.
Initially I wouldn't of considered Beem It a competitor to Apple Pay or not to the way Apple Pay stands currently in Australia as Apple hasn't rolled out the Apple Pay Cash feature internationally yet.
However that's recently changed. Beem It has only taken steps recently to start rolling out a feature that will not launch into next year that will technically never compete with Apple Pay because people are more likely to continue paying the way they used to then switching to a app and QR code bass payment system.
Thinking you can change this shows how arrogant three of the big four really are the contactless payment system has already one here in Australia the numbers show it already.
In my opinion Apple needs to hurry up with Apple Pay Cash before they miss out as a decent part of the industry is doing a pretty good job with conversational based payments that are cross platform and across multiple banks built on top of the services running on the NPP.
I switched from Commonwealth to ANZ early in the year for ApplePay, and until recently I’m glad I did.
The big four banks are kind of the ones you want to avoid specially for your situation below when travelling the good news is there is a lot of banks that offer Apple Pay and a great for travel.
Just none of the big four offer a decent product.
I just returned from a holiday in Europe and I had the choice of using my Normal Credit Cards and getting fees on every purchase, or getting a travel card and loading it up with foreign currencies before I left. The initial conversation was fee free, but I would have had to pay a percentage of any extra funds I put on after that, and the travel cards weren’t compatible with ApplePay.
Yeah none of those travel cards are compatible with Apple Pay (Soon Though.) and none of them are really any good for travel, in the case of three of the big four banks the travel cards they don't even run themselves and their run by another financial institution and they just rebranded as their own.
If Apple themselves offered basic banking services I would switch to them in a heartbeat, the Aussie banks are so reluctant to offer customers the technologies we want.
People just need to start realising there is more than the big four banks in Australia and banks are a utility and pick the best utility for the job. There's a lot of great fee free option in Australia and a lot of great options for travel as well.
However Apple did miss a great opportunity to take a segment of the Australian banking industry after three of the big banks here try to get the ACCC to take action on them.
Unfortunately Apple is never taken advantage of any market opportunity in another country other than US first. So was probably never going to happen anyway.
