Apple Pay Gears Up for the Holidays
Despite only being released not even two months ago, Apple Pay is already the most popular NFC payment platform available. Apple CEO Tim Cook recently told BGR.com that more than 1 million credit cards were activated on Apple Pay in the first three days after it launched — a big accomplishment, especially since only the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus in the United States can offer that functionality.
This week, Square announced it would also accept Apple Pay, paving the way for the payment solution to support the small business market. Although critics have suggested that the technology Apple Pay uses, near field communication, is not used widely, it appears consumers are eager to adopt the solution. Therefore, it’s likely we will see a shift in PoS moving to iOS to more and more payment and transaction data going through end user and consumer devices. The holiday shopping season —which officially starts tomorrow — will put Apple Pay to the test.
“This year, the usage will probably be low due to roll out time for merchants and the fact that we see more and more holiday shopping moving online,” said Adam Elt, Bluebook Security on Apple Pay. “This time next year however, we’ll be in a completely different landscape as Apple has made the right strategic moves to make touchless payment via smartphone able to succeed, which means we’ll even see an uptick in those using Android to pay for merchandise.”
While Apple’s implementation of NFC is nearly identical to Google Wallet’s, Apple authenticates using Touch ID while Google uses a PIN, which is less secure. The iPhone stores credit/debit card on the secure part of the SoC while Google stores data on their servers — again, less secure.
“The introduction of tokenization in the Apple Pay process, is a great win for consumer security as well,” added Elt. “This will reduce risks in some areas and help push tokenization utilization forward, though there will still be risk on the end user’s device.”
