What happens when Apple Pay hits 100%? I am not talking about 100% merchant acceptance, as much of that is driven by an alignment of merchant interests – cost reduction, potential for increased sales and marketing etc. Instead, I am talking about coverage – the share of total available cards across US banks that can be provisioned into Apple Pay. Today, partly due to the diligence of networks in signing up banks for AP, cards that are responsible for 90% of total retail payment volume are now ready to be provisioned. Separately, I am told 90% of issuer portfolios will be tokenized by end of 2015. (Forget/Ignore Private Label and Discover, for the moment) Continue reading
This post is an attempt to look beyond what the presence or absence of any specific radio in iPhone6 may mean to Apple’s intent in Payments and instead – provide some color around three things that are part of this debate: a) Bring 800M credit cards on file in perspective b) Address the question of radios on the device – a topic that has a disproportionate share of the debate and finally c) Consideration of steps made by Apple to secure both iOS and its devices as waypoints in its payments journey. Oh wait, that last one is not part of the Apple payments debate today. I believe it should be. Read on to see why.