Apple eschewed banks for a retailer focus onstage at the WWDC when it spoke to payments. I sense this is an intentional shift – now that stateside, you have support from all four networks and all the major issuers – Apple understands that it needs to shift the focus on signing up more merchants, and everything we heard today drove home that note. That includes Square’s support for NFC, as well as the announcements around Kohls, JCPenney and BJ’s. MasterCard’s MDES (opposite Visa’s VTS) is the tokenization service that has enabled these partnerships – specifically through MA’s partners such as Synchrony – their press release linked – (former GE Capital) which brought on JCPenney, Alliance Data which brought on BJ’s, and CapitalOne which enabled Kohls. Continue reading