President's Choice Financial offers Apple Pay convenience to customers

President's Choice Financial has joined the Apple Pay revolution and now allows their customers to use their iPhones and Apple Watch wearables as a means to make secure and quick contactless payments. 

A division of Loblaw Companies Limited, announced the availability of Apple Pay today, offering PC Financial MasterCard customers further choice, security and convenience with the ability to use iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch to make seamless purchases.

Click to read more ...

Apple Pay comes to Parking Panda, PayByPhone Parking, and Hotel Tonight

Apple Pay is becoming more accessible to more services. This time around, Parking Panda, Hotel Tonight, and PayByPhone Parking join the list (SpotHero is another app but that isn’t available here yet).  Parking Panda, the app that finds and reserves a parking space for you, now allows you to pay via Apple Pay. And if you pay using Apple’s payment system, you get a 10 percent discount until September 1^st and it’ll be automatically deducted after you choose Apple Pay at checkout. Apple Pay users are even eligible to win a free month or year of parking among other prizes.

PayByPhone Parking, another similar parking app, also adds Apple Pay, among the other new features of the app (such as location aware imagery, smart notices, and personal reminders). Meanwhile, Hotel Tonight, will let you find and book a hotel with Apple Pay without having a Hotel Tonight account. This last-minute hotel booking app lets you book up to a week in advanced for over 15,000 hotels in 500 destinations around the world. The app is offering first-time customers that use Apple Pay US$25 off their first $135+ reservation by putting in the promo code APPLEPAY25. The promo will be available until August 30^th.

Source: Mac Rumors

Apple Pay tipped to be coming to web purchases

If recent rumours are to be believed, Apple Pay won’t just be limited to select iOS devices but will be coming to online purchases as well, which means taking the fight to PayPal. It’s said Apple might unveil this plan at the upcoming WWDC 2016. It isn’t known though if it’ll work with devices that don’t have fingerprint sensors, such as desktops, or if it’ll only work with the Safari browser. At the moment Apple Pay only works with iPhone 6/6s, iPhone 6/6s Plus, iPhone SE, both iPad Pro models, iPad mini, and Apple Watch, because it makes use of your fingerprint to verify the purchase or your heartbeat, which is the case with the Apple Watch. There have been recent rumours that Apple is also releasing a new MacBook with a Touch ID fingerprint sensor, so that could answer that concern. We’ll just have to wait a few weeks if there is any truth to the speculation.

Source: Digital Trends

Apple Pay now available in Canada's Big Five banks, In-app purchases

Apple Pay is now available in Canada to customers of BMO (MasterCard, Interac), TD (Visa, Interac), Scotiabank (Visa, Amex, Interac) which are joining CIBC, Canadian Tire and RBC Credit which launched the service last month. 

Apple Pay also extends to purchasing physical goods within apps or purchasing items from the Apple Store, while American Express is currently live and that won't change, support for all of the rest of the banks above will is also going live.

Launching payments within apps (all credit-card only; Interac support for in-app coming at a later date across these issuing banks) 

• ATB
• Canadian Tire
• CIBC
• RBC
• BMO
• TD
• Scotiabank
• American Express (already live).

Various Canadian apps have updated to be able to integrate Apple Pay for in-app purchases. For Apple Pay to work, users need an iPhone 6/6S, iPhone SE or an Apple Watch since these are the models that feature a secure enclave to enable the safe and secure transactions.

Source: Apple