Merchant Warehouse

 

September 14, 2014

 

Apple’s recent unveiling of its new iPhone 6 and Apple Pay platform has sparked a lot of conversation surrounding mobile payments, near field communications (NFC) and the future of mobile commerce. With Apple finally adopting NFC and entering the payments space, you may have some questions regarding how this might affect you and your business.

Merchant Warehouse has followed the announcement and the technology closely all in an effort to help our partners and customers understand the opportunities of Apple Pay and NFC enabled payments present for their businesses.

 

How will Apple Pay work?

Apple Pay syncs a few of Apple’s existing programs together and when coupled with the new NFC chips in the iPhone 6 can create a seamless payment experience at the point-of-sale. By combining NFC and the account information Apple already has with iTunes, the ability to store other credit, debit, gift and loyalty cards with Passbook, a secure element with their TouchID thumb print imaging, Apple Pay delivers a seamless and secure wallet solution for retail environments and mobile check-out.

 

What’s the biggest impact Apple Play will have on our industry?

 

Apple’s introduction into the payments space will have two inherent outcomes:

 

(1) applications that rely on NFC will be developed at a more rapid pace; and

(2) consumers should finally start adopting mobile payments.

 

To date, there havent been that many mobile wallets or applications that have taken advantage of NFC. But with NFC being incorporated in the iPhone 6, we can expect more and more applications using the NFC functionality for not only payment apps, but for other practical functions.

 

It has long been predicted that Apple would be the catalyst for mobile payments. They distribute the most popular mobile devices in the world, have a loyal customer base that integrate different aspects of their lives to their hardware and software and an avid developer community that develops applications to exploit their devices’ functionality.

 

We already trust Apple (and other mobile devices and platforms) with some of our most important daily functions. It’s only a matter of time before consumers begin to trust and adopt Apple Pay to be their payment method of choice.

 

Merchant Warehouse is very excited for the opportunities that Apple Pay will bring for businesses. Our Genius Customer Engagement Platform was designed for these types of innovations in mind. The NFC readers in our Genius devices can accept Apple Pay payments today and it will continue to evolve with future innovations.