tmiw

Probably depends on how many people activate(d) the prepaid MC part of it. They may be able to coast without EMV for quite a while if there's not many people using that feature.

Anyway, besides Redbird and the Andrews FCU prepaid card, are there actually any others with EMV?

RedLight2015

Hey. It is another option for a Contactless card though! It's MSD only but in the US, who cares?? I'll bite and play with it.

emmanuel_t

Don't worry, I know. EMV and native currency with Amex Apple Pay just happen to correlate anyway.

tmiw

Oh, speaking of prepaid cards, whatever happened to the Starbucks one that Chase was supposed to come out with? I was totally expecting that to be how they implement loyalty in the mobile wallets as Chase's regular prepaid card IIRC is supported in Apple Pay too.

emmanuel_t

It was probably destined to fail like the Duetto card ~ten years ago.

tmiw

That sounds like a credit card though, which probably wasn't ideal for them. At least with the prepaid card it'd probably be considered a debit card under Durbin and result in Starbucks paying very little (if anything) to run them.

manda99

The McDonald's in Ogilvie Station, Chicago, still has terminals so old that the screen looks like a circa 2003 Palm Pilot. Half the time, they crash and reboot as you try to pay.

The one near my home has Apple Pay logo on the window of the drive thru. I pulled up the other day and my purse was in back seat but phone was in my hand, so I said I'd use Apple Pay. The cashier just looked at me said 'No'.

RedLight2015

It's not within their right to say no. Yell at them until they cave. Some stupid people do really need to be put in their place and only say no because they're too lazy to hand you the terminal.

tmiw

In fairness, it really is a hassle for both consumers and employees to use mobile wallets at most drive-throughs. It'd be much improved if they didn't have an obsession with using the same exact terminal type at every POS station. Or even if they went with something smaller than the MX915 at all of them; it's not like signature's going to be bothered with half the time anyway.

tmiw

For those who subscribe to WSJ, what are your thoughts on this article? https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-p...rss_Technology

Unfortunately, it's paywalled (and they patched the Google workaround) so I have no idea what it says. But from what I've read elsewhere it sounds like a lot of people really aren't comfortable with using Apple Pay for security reasons.

MASTERNC

Not much we didn't already know

- Consumers don't understand it (think it's insecure or not even aware of it)
- Merchants don't train their employees, so there is a lot of confusion if someone tries to use NFC
- Acceptance is growing but still poor

There are suggestions that Apple needs to promote or educate the public more about Apple Pay.

Consumerist gives you the gist of the article for free:

https://consumerist.com/2017/04/05/w...ing-apple-pay/

emmanuel_t

Starbucks transactions were processed in a closed loop system, and it's possible that something of the sort would be done with the prepaid card.

I pasted it below. Something something Drudge Report as referer...

------------

Apple Pay Promised to Make Plastic Obsolete. Then Came Wary Shoppers, Confused Clerks
Just 13% of iPhone users have tried the mobile-payment service, by one estimate; Apple works to recruit, train merchants
To pay, Apple Pay users hold the phone above a payment terminal that uses a technology known as near-field communication to transmit credit- and debit-card information.
To pay, Apple Pay users hold the phone above a payment terminal that uses a technology known as near-field communication to transmit credit- and debit-card information. PHOTO: CHARLES SYKES/ASSOCIATED PRESS
By TRIPP MICKLE
April 5, 2017 5:30 a.m. ET
143 COMMENTS
Nancy Schrum watched curiously as a colleague from her law firm waved an iPhone above a credit-card reader to buy a Subway sandwich with Apple Pay earlier this year.

“I have that, but I’m afraid to use it,” said Ms. Schrum, who feared the technology wouldn’t work.

When Apple Inc. AAPL +0.39% launched its mobile-payment service more than two years ago, it hoped to speed up the checkout process and, ultimately, to replace physical wallets for U.S. consumers.

Apple Pay has made significant headway, but Ms. Schrum’s wariness reflects a range of factors that analysts say have caused growth to undershoot their expectations, including security concerns about the service, retailers that don’t accept it, and Apple’s relatively paltry marketing.

The pace of Apple Pay adoption has been “disappointing even to conservative expectations,” said Gene Munster, managing partner at Loup Ventures, a venture-capital firm specializing in tech research. Just 13% of the estimated 680 million iPhone users have used Apple Pay, according to the research firm.

Eddy Cue, Apple senior vice president in charge of internet software and services, said the service has been adopted faster than other payment systems and he believes it will eventually replace cash, debit and credit cards as the primary payment system.

“Does it matter if we get there in two years, three years [or] five years?” Mr. Cue said in an interview. “Ultimately, no.”

MORE

Which Is Safer, Apple Pay or a Credit Card?
The service requires users to upload their credit or debit card to their iPhone wallet by scanning an image of it. To pay at the checkout line, they hold the phone—or Apple Watch—above a contactless payment terminal that uses a technology known as near-field communication to transmit the card’s information. Fingerprint verification is required for security. The service can also be used to pay in apps and online.

Many U.S. consumers remain wary of such a service, according to technology research firm Creative Strategies: 40% are concerned about the security risks of adding a credit or debit card to their phone, and more than 60% aren’t familiar with contactless payments.

Compounding Apple Pay’s challenges, only a third of U.S. stores accept it as a form of payment, according to the Nilson Report. The payment-industry trade publication notes, however, that the service’s rate of acceptance has more than doubled since 2015.

“If you can’t use it everywhere, why are you going to switch?” said Braden More, Wells Fargo & Co.’s head of partnerships and industry relations, who is surprised more retailers haven’t embraced mobile payments. He expects acceptance and usage to grow.


Big names including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Kroger Co. haven’t yet enabled Apple Pay, due in part to technical hurdles, and even at stores that do use the service, users say cashiers often aren’t familiar with it.

Paul Davis said he recently had to inform a McDonald’s cashier in Cincinnati that the burger chain accepted Apple Pay and show her how. “It happens all the time,” he said.

Vice President of Apple Pay Jennifer Bailey said Apple has a team working with merchants to instruct cashiers and add instructions to check-out manuals. She said more than half of the biggest 100 merchants in the U.S. have adopted Apple Pay, including Best Buy Co. , Kohl’s Corp. and Starbucks Corp.

Loup Ventures’ Mr. Munster, a longtime Apple analyst previously with brokerage Piper Jaffray Co., estimates Apple Pay last year handled $36 billion in transactions, far less than the $207 billion he had predicted by 2016 after Apple started the service.

Apple doesn’t disclose the number or value of Apple Pay transactions, but Chief Executive Tim Cook recently said the number of users has tripled over the past year and transaction volume increased more than sixfold last year.

Apple Pay brought in $30 million in revenue last year, according to Sanford C. Bernstein—a fraction of the $24.35 billion generated last fiscal year by Apple’s services unit, which also comprises Apple’s App store and iTunes. The company announced in January it aimed to double its services revenue by 2021. Apple Pay generates revenue from charging banks a slice of each transaction, often 0.15% per credit-card transaction and a half cent per debit-card purchase.

Shortly after Apple Pay was introduced, rivals Samsung Electronics Co. and Alphabet Inc. introduced similar payment services. Samsung Pay is more broadly accepted than Apple Pay because of proprietary technology it uses, while Android Pay is accepted by roughly the same number of retailers as Apple Pay, according to the Nilson Report.

Still, U.S. consumers are about twice as likely to have used Apple Pay as rivals, according to First Annapolis Consulting, Inc., a payment adviser.

Nilson Report publisher David Robertson said that with about a third of U.S. retailers adopting it, Apple Pay is on the cusp of broad acceptance. “It’s going to become so ubiquitous that we will all do it,” he said.

Apple expected consumers to embrace Apple Pay as energetically as they did iTunes—an instant hit when it launched in 2003—because executives felt it was faster and safer than existing payment systems, a former employee on the project said. When retailers didn’t support it initially, the person said, Apple executives were reluctant to promote it and invest in retail terminals that would spur adoption.

Apple developed two commercials touting Apple Pay, which aired in 2015, though banks also have advertised the service. It has invested in other promotions like free shipping for Apple Pay purchases online and processing-fee discounts for smaller merchants. It also added the service to devices like its newest laptop, integrated it into the Safari browser for online shopping, and the service is now available in more than a dozen countries, including Japan and Spain.

Accelerating Apple Pay’s reach is important for Apple as it negotiates extensions of three-year agreements with banks and credit-card issuers this year, said James Wester, a research director at IDC Financial Insights. Apple Pay’s fees cut into issuers’ roughly 2% share of transactions, he said.

Mr. Cue said he was confident banks would renew because they “can see the growth.”

Write to Tripp Mickle at [email protected]

RedLight2015

Best place is the El Pollo Loco drive through. They use the smaller PAX terminal that they hand you either for a PIN or contactless. Unfortunately they just take the card for regular old C&S. Nonetheless, better than most drive through claiming to accept Apple Pay. Larger PAX for inside the store to look fancy.

Starbucks is a close second, but they use Vx820 throughout.

tmiw

Thanks for the Consumerist link. ^

I remember Tim Cook (or maybe some other Apple exec?) mentioning something on an earnings call about how 2/3rds of all merchant locations are going to accept AP by the end of the year. I can't help but think that's a bit optimistic considering the challenges described above. I mean, maybe 2/3rds of places will have the hardware, but a lot of them will either a) have NFC explicitly disabled, b) be unusable due to poor training or c) be unusable because the terminal isn't even customer accessible.

Ironically, something that may help with (b) is wider adoption of Quick Chip. It'll at least take the cashier out of the picture, leaving only (a) and (c) as issues. Those will probably only be fixed as more people use mobile wallets.

tmiw

Something that would be nice is if AmEx had a contactless option on their "replace card" page. Currently it shows the following when going to it for a non-contactless card:



(Same shows for the no AF HHonors card and Blue for Business, the latter of which is definitely able to get contactless.)

Sure, you can call or online chat someone, but that's just another bit of friction for the whole process--discouraging some from opting in.