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
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. 
This post is in response to the recent 
I remember creating my Paypal account back in 2000 when an acquaintance of mine wanted to split the lunch tab with me, and sent me $20 via email a couple of days later. I remember hurriedly opting to cash out via check, having little trust in a newfangled payment startup. That $20 actually languished in said Paypal account (despite issuing a check that ended up never being cashed) for another couple of years before I actually did something with that money and my Paypal account. What follows is the rest of that journey. 