MCX Postpones Rollout of Apple Pay Rival 'CurrentC'

[American Hero]

Last I heard was 5 million users spending an average of $100 over six months. That's not exactly what I'd call "popular".

It isn't Samsung's fault the average user is brain dead.

But then again, in other countries, contactless cards are perfectly fine for every day use.

Also, the amount of banks supporting Samsung Pay vs. Apple Pay has something to do with that.
[doublepost=1463487674][/doublepost]

At two places that don't support it at all?

That said, Kroger has one of the faster chip card implementations in my experience. Don't take my word for it--I actually recorded it one day.

Weren't you the one that said chip and pin wasn't going to happen in the U.S?

You just used chip and pin in that video...

 

[MacBergin]

There are still retailers here that have no clue how to properly use ApplePay even though they accept it. Rite Aid constantly is making me sign a paper copy at random dollar amounts. its never consistent. Shaw's supermarkets want the 4 digit device code, your signature on the screen and an ID to match the signature...meanwhile the guy in front of me with the stolen credit card needed none of this.
I think dinosaurs are running these companies. If you don't accept ApplePay or you don't know how to use it I find a new place to shop.

 

[WarHeadz]

Wow, your milage definitely does vary from mine. I've found Apple Pay to be at most a modest a saver of time and effort given that most merchants still (stupidly) require confirmation of the charge amount and a signature on the screen. What I have done in the end is taken my phone out of my pocket instead of my wallet. Big deal. I am still using Apple Pay when possible, but it still falls far short of ridiculously fantastic. Maybe that accounts for why many of the cashiers in the transactions where I've used it have never seen anyone else do it before, and in some cases, did not know that they even could. This tech has a long way to go.

Try it on an Apple Watch. Completely different experience than a phone, quite superior. Don't need to take anything out of your pocket.

 

[American Hero]

There are still retailers here that have no clue how to properly use ApplePay even though they accept it. Rite Aid constantly is making me sign a paper copy at random dollar amounts. its never consistent. Shaw's supermarkets want the 4 digit device code, your signature on the screen and an ID to match the signature...meanwhile the guy in front of me with the stolen credit card needed none of this.
I think dinosaurs are running these companies. If you don't accept ApplePay or you don't know how to use it I find a new place to shop.

Used Apple Pay at McDonalds a few months ago, and then when I went to use it again the cashier said, "we can't let you use the same debit card twice, it's a fraud mechanism."

I'm like, first of all dude, it's fricken McDonalds, people don't skim cards and create new ones to buy food at a cheap fast food place. Second, it requires my fingerprint so it is definitely MY card, and third, that's the stupidest policy ever, even without Apple Pay.

 

[AirunJae]

Yes, because getting a QR code and then having it scanned by the cashier is SO much more convenient than double-tapping my Watch to pay for something Here's to hoping more places start to take Pay at a more rapid pace.

 

[neil_cm17]

That's just silly. Chip cards are demonstrably MUCH slower than swipe, and that's without adding a PIN. With a PIN, I would say it's on the order of 10-20x slower. I have used chip & PIN throughout Europe and seen it attempted at Target in the US, with disastrous results (in terms of wasted time). Here's the difference between Europe and USA: Europe is still a quaint little place that operates at a pace and volume an order of magnitude slower than the US. Chip and PIN is fine at a local pub in England, a quaint restaurant in old town Prague, or a drugstore in Paris. It doesn't, however, work at a US megastore like Target, which does in one hour the volume of transactions that any of those places do in a week. Chip & PIN just doesn't scale to US consumerism. At least not without a lot of pain. Europeans tolerate chip & PIN because they plan to sit and sip wine and chat for 2 hours at the restaurant after dinner - while in America, the Cheesecake Factory wants to process you and get you out the door FAST to make more revenue off that table. Same with retail store purchases. More speed = more revenue. We buy stuff as fast as they can sell it.

There much be something wrong with the implementation of chip in the United States. Here, in the UK, as soon as you as you are prompted to insert you card you are immediately prompted to enter you PIN and in the vast majority of cases the transaction is immediately improved. It is way faster then the old method of swiping the card and signing a receipt (which no one hardly ever bothered to check).

 

[mbh1976]

Why? QR codes are fantastic way for machines to read small bits of information extremely efficiently?

It's fine in a business sense (UPS labels for packages), but not ok for consumer uses. QR code readers are fragmented and it makes no sense to scan something, then show that scan to someone so they can scan it. DUMB.

 

[TalonFlyer]

Apple Pay competitor Merchant Payment Consortium, aka MCX, has decided to postpone the rollout of its CurrentC payments platform following feedback from its pilot program. MCX will be downscaling and laying off 30 employees as it transitions to focusing on business partnerships with financial institutions instead of building out CurrentC.

MCX CEO Brian Mooney announced the news in a statement today, which was shared by TechCrunch.
MCX, a consortium of merchants like Walmart, Best Buy, CVS, Rite Aid, Target, Lowe's, and more, has been working on the CurrentC payments platform since 2012. Given that it was backed by multiple high profile retailers, it was believed CurrentC could be a major Apple Pay competitor, but over the past two years, it has not moved out of the testing and development phase.

CurrentC made headlines in 2014 after MCX members CVS and Rite Aid disabled Apple Pay at their retail locations due to MCX exclusivity agreements that lasted until 2015, while other MCX retailers, like Walmart and Best Buy, publicly stated they would not support Apple Pay.

As CurrentC development stalled and exclusivity agreements expired, several MCX members that refused to accept Apple Pay, including Rite Aid and Best Buy, reversed course and began using Apple's payment platform. Major CurrentC backer Walmart, meanwhile, developed its own Apple Pay competitor called Walmart Pay, further casting doubt on the future success of CurrentC.

CurrentC relied on customers to open an app and scan QR codes to make payments, a convoluted system that has been described as offering minimal benefit to consumers. Merchants backed CurrentC because it aimed to do away with credit card processing fees by requiring customers to connect a bank account or pre-paid debit card, and it offered the ability to track customer purchases, something not possible with Apple Pay.

Article Link: MCX Postpones Rollout of Apple Pay Rival 'CurrentC'

 

[Xavier]

I don't know anyone that tried using CurrentC and I live in Columbus. Actually, the majority of people that I know weren't even aware of its existence.

 

[alllexx]

Are we still talking about the retailer side?

I haven't heard about any retailers that support one without the other. Plus, why would you not support Apple Pay even if it's less volume, because iPhone users tend to be heavier spenders. When Apple Pay first launched it already worked at all the retailers that had NFC payments enabled, they didn't have to do anything special to make it work for Apple Pay.

 

[TalonFlyer]

Duh!

Kludgy implementation didn't work, what a surprise.

 

[Thunderhawks]

A non-negative Apple post, must be a slow news day here.

We can change that:

Since it's a service that doesn't work, Apple should buy the company.

 

[coolfactor]

I seem to remember a gaggle of commenters here saying right from the start that this would go precisely nowhere. It was fueled by Wal-Mart's desire to stiff Visa the percentage cut it takes, and that's about all it was.

So a couple of years later and several million dollars down the rathole - this is all that there is.

Hey, Wal-Mart and MCX - you can't say we didn't tell ya' !!

Walmart went ahead and built their own solution - Walmart Pay. I wonder if that was a loophole in the contract? They were not allow to work with any third-party payment options, but nothing stopped them from building their own solution internally? I say smart on Walmart. Just too bad it's one more singular solution, unlike Apple Pay.

 

[alllexx]

Used Apple Pay at McDonalds a few months ago, and then when I went to use it again the cashier said, "we can't let you use the same debit card twice, it's a fraud mechanism."

I'm like, first of all dude, it's fricken McDonalds, people don't skim cards and create new ones to buy food at a cheap fast food place. Second, it requires my fingerprint so it is definitely MY card, and third, that's the stupidest policy ever, even without Apple Pay.

Was the cashier high? I've never heard of a policy like that. So they don't like repeat customers? Do they expect you to change your card number every time you go to McDonald's?

 

[coolfactor]

This is so dumb... I was just in London for 2 weeks, and you could use Apple Pay almost everywhere there because they are so current on contactless payment cards. It was glorious. Pubs, supermarkets, restaurants, the "tube", everywhere. It was amazing, and really made the Apple Watch shine.

Canada is the same way... high-availability contactless payments. And Apple Pay is finally making inroads! Time to get that Apple Watch, and a current iPhone.

 

[American Hero]

Was the cashier high? I've never heard of a policy like that. So they don't like repeat customers? Do they expect you to change your card number every time you go to McDonald's?

I guess I should've added, "in the same visit."

But yeah that's what I thought too.

 

[aristobrat]

You just wonder how many stupid people are out there. CurrentC just died and Walmert still think it can pull it off for a system that you can only use at Walmart. Deaf, blind and dumb.

Here is what's interesting to me (emphasis mine):

More than twenty million customers actively use the Walmart app each month and it ranks among the top three retail apps in the Google and Apple app stores. The Walmart app enhances the shopping experience in Walmart stores with features including checking in to pick up an online order at a Walmart store, refilling pharmacy prescriptions and finding an item’s store location.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160516005842/en/Walmart-Introduces-Walmart-Pay-Arkansas

So if Walmart already has 20 million people (?!) using the Walmart app monthly, just adding a "Pay" feature to the list of features people already use it for doesn't sound quite as crazy as CurrentC rolling in and trying to get everyone to use an app that they were never using before.

 

[samcraig]

Try it on an Apple Watch. Completely different experience than a phone, quite superior. Don't need to take anything out of your pocket.

So you're suggestion is that people buy a watch for a couple of hundred to save a little time? I know that's not what you really meant. But I agree with the OP - and something that a watch doesn't address is that the institutions and process isn't streamlined - no matter if you're using a card, phone or watch. Several places still require a signature and/or terminal input. I use Android Pay (because I don't use my work phone to pay for things) and it's great. But I don't use it because it saves me that much time really.

 

[ohio.emt]

There much be something wrong with the implementation of chip in the United States. Here, in the UK, as soon as you as you are prompted to insert you card you are immediately prompted to enter you PIN and in the vast majority of cases the transaction is immediately improved. It is way faster then the old method of swiping the card and signing a receipt (which no one hardly ever bothered to check).

I know at the walmart where I live you can insert your card before the transaction is done. You then have to wait until everything is scanned and the cashier hits a payment key. The card then has a brief authorization. Then you enter your pin, select your cash back option and then if the amount is right, and then finally your card is charged.

 

[AsherN]

I understand there are variations as they have different contractual obligations.

AT the retailer and consumer end, all that needs to be done is for contactless payment to be enabled. It's the card issuers that need to modify their back-end to support it. Apple Pay has worked in Canada at the retail level ever since it was launched, even though Canadian banks have only started to support it. It's treated as a contactless transaction. The only difference would be if the back-end would treat a Apple/Android Pay transaction as a Chip-and-PIN transaction as opposed to a contactless.

 

[2457282]

Should have been called An-T-quated. Now it will be called DOA. It is a study case of a bunch of vendors coming together with the hopes of forcing customers to use a bad system that only benefits the vendor. The days of being able to do this are long gone. Samsung bought a system that in the short term is actually better in places that do not have NFC. In the long term, NFC with the security of tokenization is the best option and Apple is already there. Hopefully everyone jumps on this bandwagon so we all have a better and more secure transaction experience.

 

[zorinlynx]

Apple Pay has been so unreliable for me that I don't know if it has much hope to really become universal.

My most recent example was at a car wash. I drove up to the machine and noticed the Apple Pay logo, so I tapped $5 wash, and held my phone out to it with my thumb on the sensor... Before I can blink the attendant comes over and says "No that's not working."

I respond "But the logo is there, why wouldn't it work?"

"I have no idea." Of course you don't. (not blaming the kid, he really has no idea why it doesn't work, but it's frustrating to run into this crap regularly)

I pull out my credit card and swipe and that ends up working fine.

THE APPLE PAY LOGO WAS RIGHT THERE ON THE MACHINE and it didn't work. Experiences like this make people just not bother, and use their card because it will always work, the first time, without an awkward encounter.

EDIT: No it didn't work by the way. I got the checkmark and DING! sound, but the machine completely ignored it. And no double-charge, so that wasn't it either.

 

[American Hero]

EDIT: No it didn't work by the way. I got the checkmark and DING! sound, but the machine completely ignored it. And no double-charge, so that wasn't it either.

Had an experience like that at Sunoco once. Used the phone to pay, you heard the little chime that signaled it transferred the information, and then selected credit only to hear, "it says not approved."

Uh, why does it say not approved??

 

[thisisnotmyname]

nope

did you manage to escape the layoffs?

 

[zorinlynx]

It can't help that most of their merchant partners (Walmart, Target, etc.) are rolling out their own competing pay systems.

The worst thing about this philosophy is the end game. Every single store having their own app? It'll be annoying as hell!

Of course, the stores don't see this and are selfish and want to shut down universal systems that would solve the problem.