Very interesting! In that case, I won't give up trying! I'm going to have a go at other places and see if I can get any to work!
The key is still that your card's bank has to have made a deal with Apple (and unless they hire it out like many do, also create a back end computer interface so iPhone users can register their cards via Apple's servers... which should be unnecessary, but it allows Apple to keep track of, and control, which cards should be paying them a percentage).
In other words, Apple Pay is like having a car that runs on standard gasoline. In theory it should be able to use standard gasoline anywhere. But Apple's car is made with a fuel fill door that will only unlock if a particular gas station brand has agreed to give Apple part of what you spend for gas. In return, the gas station gets access to Apple's customers and gets to keep all the usual purchase information they got before.
In some ways, perhaps it's better that it's not the banks that are the holdup, as I'd imagine that having to negotiate with each of them individually would be a herculean task, with no guarantee of results,
Apple
does have to make a deal with each individual bank. Luckily for them, if one major bank in a country does so, then the rest often feel they have to make a deal as well. That's what finally happened with Barclay's in the UK.
But banks have gotten smarter. They realize that Apple needs them more than they need Apple. Unlike the US and UK, Canadian and Australian banks so far have stuck together, and are no doubt negotiating with Apple for lower / no fees at all.
Note also: the initial three year contract in the US is running out soon. It's a good bet the banks will be more hardcore in their renegotiations now that they have a better handle on things.
In the US, Apple demanded 0.15% of every purchase. While major US banks, with little previous customer verification and deep pockets (~2.0% per transaction) were able to justify (and later, regret) this, the rest of the world is not so well off. For that matter, it even hurts US credit unions and other small low profit banks.
Contactless fees in many EU countries such as France are only around 0.22%. The UK, which might be capping theirs soon the same way, is currently 0.65%. Either way, giving Apple 0.15% is impossible to support. Word is that UK banks ended up negotiating less than half the fee that US banks pay.
In Canada, the debit card fee is $0.006 (6/10ths of a penny) per transaction. In the US, Apple demands 1/2 cent per debit transaction, or what would be almost the entire Canadian fee.
All of this is just the tip of the Apple Pay iceberg. Banks also have to pay Visa/MC etc for tokenization services per transaction. For example, MC charges $0.50 for provisioning a token, and $0.025 per token API call.
The banks also have to hire extra help centers for Apple Pay. Moreover, they have to give Apple constant reports about purchase types and places... financial information that was formerly proprietary.
At least Mastercard etc. earn their transaction fees by doing something active. OTOH, Apple itself has no such costs during a transaction, since they only provide the device (which they already made a huge profit on). Their fee is basically a charge for access to their users (a classic the-customer-is-the-product scenario).
The theory is it comes out of the banks cut of interchange fees, and is funded by reduced fraud costs.
In longtime contactless places like the UK, contactless payment fraud is only running at about 0.007% of the purchase amount.
That fraud rate is less than 1/20th of what Apple gets in the US per transaction (0.15%). So, as far as contactless fraud goes, it's still much cheaper for banks to keep things as they are.
Where something like Apple Pay could make a huge difference in fraud, is if it was used for online purchases.
