Apple looks to put bad quarter behind with payments down under

cool apple logo

In a less than stellar quarter for Apple that involved the company announcing iPhone sales being down a whopping 18.4 per cent (although heavily caveated by the fact that previous sales were through the roof given the different iPhone 6s) one ray of light came unexpectedly from Apple Pay.

In the conference call, the CEO Tim Cook said that the service is working with more than five times in transaction volume of a year ago and gaining one million new users per week. However, say hello to a pinch of salt since no numbers were mentioned. In fact, we know very little about how Apple classifies ‘new users’. But that’s a whole different story.

This week, there were some good news for the tech giant as the company finally properly broke into Australia. The company was historically met with resistance from Australia’s ‘Big Four’ – ANZ, Westpac, National Australia Bank and Commonwealth Bank – with them being unhappy at the fees Apple charged. FOr a while the only cards the payment service worked with were the American Express issued ones. However, in the first week of May one bank finally strayed from the pack.

 

apple pay

Apple goes down under

ANZ announced it will offer Apple Pay to its five million customers in Australia. ANZ customers in Australia can now use Apple Pay to make purchases wherever contactless payments are accepted with either an ANZ Visa debit or credit card or an ANZ American Express credit card.

“With the high adoption rates of contactless payments in Australia, our customers will be world leaders in their ability to use their mobiles to make the vast bulk of essential payments,” said ANZ Chief Executive Officer Shayne Elliott.

Six out of ten card transactions in Australia are now contactless and more than 70% of merchant payment terminals work with contactless.

 

Domino effect?

The most important aspect of this partnership actually is now what will the rest of the Big Four pack do. Collectively, the four banks account for 80% of all cards synced up with a mobile payments system so it would be a huge win for Apple if one by one the dominoes started falling.

 

Apple Pay in the USA and the UK

Over in the US, Apple has added 20 more new banks whilst in the UK, Wirecard launched its new mobile payment solution, boon, which works with the tech giant’s payment service.

“Boon is based on an automatic app-to-wallet integration via a prepaid account with a digital MasterCard, issued by Wirecard Card Solutions. This allows users to top-up their account via Faster Payments, debit or credit card. boon works at any NFC-enabled terminal everywhere the MasterCard contactless logo appears,” the company said in a statement.

iphone with Wirecard's boon application

“With boon, Apple Pay can now be part of everyone’s life in the UK without being a customer of a specific bank”, said Dr. Markus Braun, CEO of Wirecard.

Related reading

Leave a comment