You have to excuse us Americans.
We have no clue what it's like to live under "proper regulation" or to have our governing bodes "standing up for consumer rights".
America is AWASH in corporate propaganda and all that results from it.
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Curve Pay Launches iPhone NFC Payments as Apple Pay Alternative
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You have to excuse us Americans.
We have no clue what it's like to live under "proper regulation" or to have our governing bodes "standing up for consumer rights".
America is AWASH in corporate propaganda and all that results from it.
Unfortunately this is one of those things non-Europeans can’t intuitively understand, which is a shame.
Maybe in some countries the idea of switching banks sounds like a nightmare, but in Europe, if your bank doesn’t support a feature you want (e.g. Apple Pay, or integration with Curve), switching seamlessly to a competitor is incredibly easy and simple.
This regulation works at least partially because years of previous regulations all build upon one another for a much better overall experience.
This is assuming your card issuer supports both Apple Pay contactless and Curve contactless. Most likely a proliferation of wallet apps will lead to commercial deals whereby card issuers only support their preferred wallet App (I.e. the one they have a deal with), so if you have 2 cards one might be Apple Pay only and the other Curve only, forcing you to have one separate App on your phone for each card.
And in any case, you always have your physical card as a backup if your mobile wallet doesn’t work (which honestly hasn’t been an issue for me with Apple Pay).
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I can easily see a bank like Chase pushing using their own wallet app and then removing Apple Pay support expecting that the vast majority of Chase credit card users will just transition over to their payment system. And they probably will since I’d guess the vast majority of people only use like 1-3 cards.
They save .15% per transaction, and if they can get many of their customers to set the double power shortcut to Chase Wallet instead of Apple Pay, it pushes people to use their cards more often.
We will never understand the critics who are cheering for Apple to get busted up.
You’re thinking about this through the lens of an AP user. This gives existing CP users a nice feature.
Side comment. Adding my other credit card to my AP Wallet has caused zero issues for me
Haven't you heard, the NFC chip is Apple's IP just like how the camera, USB-C port, display, audio and video chips, and Wi-Fi and modem chips are Apple's IP. Allowing any company access to these components is basically giving them a free ride Apple's coat tails.
Unless that person is walletless. Isn't that the reason why Apple is offering all these digital features including digital IDs, so people don't have to carry around ID's, cash/coins, and credit/debit cards anymore?
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But Curve is only useful because the EU has regulated the market to death such that so many credit cards aren’t available in Apple Pay. So it’s a solution to a self inflicted gunshot wound. And now more solutions are needed to help that first solution survive.
Perhaps not shooting yourself in the foot in the first place would have been the better option?
Finally the point is gotten. Competition by regulation isnt competition. Even the wsj has their comments on the negative aspects of this.
It could be great for transit cards that otherwise don’t want or won’t be able to satisfy Apple’s terms and requirements to get on to Apple Pay.
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That means the regulations that broke up Ma Bell and created competition (what little we have today) isn't really competition.
Curve itself is irrelevant. PayPal, Zelle, CashApp, etc. will all get NFC access. NFC isn’t proprietary like the H# chips, this is like letting other apps access Bluetooth, or giving the OS access to Airplay.
Ah yes, let's pretend the software written by Apple to make sure all of those components work and are accessible to apps doesn't exist.
The benefit to users is that since Apple is not charging any their ransom on each transaction, the cost of each payment will go down. Even if the users don’t see it directly as it is opaque to them, this cost is always transferred to them ultimately in the form of higher prices or lower quality. In the long term things will be cheaper than they would have otherwise been. Or higher quality, or a combination thereof.
To quote myself in that other thread;
Consumer protections? In my United States? Absolutely not!
Calling Apple's .15% fee (charged to the bank/credit card company, not consumers or merchants) a ransom really gives the game away, right? You realize curve nets .2-.3% per transaction AND then aggregates customer data and sells it to other companies, right?
And we really think if Apple didn't charge the .15% Banks/Credit card companies would pass along the savings to their customers?
Haha, what little we have says it all. Anyway it is what it is and will see where this goes.
You don't think banks and card companies just eat that cost, do you? They pass it on to the consumer in one way or another.
Not long ago we were typing on T9 keyboards. Maybe we need a bit of inconvenience from time to time to keep us from becoming completely incapable idiots.
We have less telecom competition today than decades before because those regulations that gave us all that competition were slowly rolled back and killed or were no longer being enforced. The deregulation allowed the telecom companies to merge and reduce competition.
Witness all the merger and buyout announcements over the last 10 years, the most recent of which is the announcement that Charter Communications will be buying Cox Communications, Verizon buying Frontier, and AT&T buying Lumen Technologies (CenturyLink).
Prior to this was T-Mobile buying Sprint (not to mention Sprint buying Nextel) and MetroPCS, and more recently Mint Mobile and US Cellular. There was Verizon buying TracFone Wireless (and sister brands like Simple Mobile, Straight Talk, Total Wireless).
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Legal rulings? Google launched before the Microsoft anti-trust trial even got started. And the development of Google occurred years before that.
Nope I was thinking of it from the perspective of an existing curve user with an iPhone. I’ve used Curve myself and I don’t see what benefit it will bring for Curve users.
The way it works is that you can can add multiple payment cards to your Curve account, and they issue you a card which basically acts as a proxy: you always pay with the curve card and they in turn charge it to the currency “source card” you have selected.
Currently it already works with Apple Pay (ie the Curve card which redirects payement to other cards can be added to Apple Pay).
The question I am asking is: what benefit is there for the user (Curve user) if the payment is made through a curve App rather than Apple Pay? (Given that in the and the same curve payment card is being charged and the same proxy paiement service is enforced)
What benefit to you have in mind in this process from stopping to use Apple Pay with the curve card and using the curve wallet App instead?
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I wouldn’t expect any change for the cost of transactions with personal payment cards in Europe. Transaction fees are already regulated at a rock bottom price and no financial institution is charging less than the ceiling price.