The Apple Beat: Why Apple Pay is sending shockwaves through the payments industry

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

 Apple Pay is actually a very big deal. More than just enabling mobile payments in a handful of partner retailers, the entire system is designed to ‘just work’ once the switch is flipped. Apple Pay will hope to become as prevalent a payment option as Visa, MasterCard or any debit card that people are already using. 

The first public Apple Pay transaction is still a few weeks away from happening, but news that Apple’s solution to mobile payments is coming, is sending shockwaves through the payments sector.

A key feature of the new iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus and Apple Watch, Apple Pay has the backing of major credit card companies, over 800 million ready-to-go credit cards on iTunes, various debit cards plus 220,000 retailers and businesses have already signed up or, at the very least, already have the necessary infrastructure to accept Apple Pay without any large investment in hardware or training.

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Google adds PayPal support for Play Store

You can now use your PayPal account to pay for purchases from Google’s Play Store. Canada is one of the 12 countries that can use their PayPal accounts to purchase apps, games, books, music, movies, and other in-app purchases. PayPal will be added as an option in Google Wallet. It will just require you to enter your PayPal login details. Google did not indicate if you will need to enter your login credentials every time though. Let us know when you try it out.

Source: Android Developers

PayPal and TouchBistro team up, enable café and restaurant check-in and payments

PayPal Canada today announced an agreement with innovative Canadian restaurant technology provider TouchBistro. This new collaboration will allow customers to use their smartphone to check-in and pay with PayPal at cafés and restaurants at the point of sale. PayPal’s check-in functionality integrated with TouchBistro’s point of sale (POS) technology will make it easy for restaurants to accept mobile payments and interact with their customers in new and exciting ways.

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RIM Receives Approval from Visa for NFC Mobile Payment Solution

Olympic triathlete Simon Whitfield made the first mobile credit card transaction using Rogers Suretap on a NFC-enabled BlackBerry smartphone.

Research In Motion announced that its Secure Element Manager (SEM) solution for NFC (Near Field Communication) mobile payments has been approved by Visa. RIM’s SEM is the backend solution for carriers that can securely manage credentials on SIM (subscriber identity module) cards installed in all types of NFC-capable mobile devices.

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