Showing posts with label payments. Show all posts
Showing posts with label payments. Show all posts

​Apple teams with top credit cards for iPhone 6 payments, reports say

Even the Samsung Galaxy S3 allowed for mobile payments -- this one done at a McDonald's in the UK. Rich Trenholm/CNET

It's Labor Day weekend in the US, a time for barbecues, back-to-school shopping -- and iPhone rumors of course.

Recode on Sunday reported that American Express has agreed to "work together" with Apple on its new iPhone payment system, which is widely expected to be introduced with an iPhone 6 at Apple's September 9 event.

Citing unnamed sources familiar with the talks, Recode added that American Express is just one of several partners the iPhone maker needs to sign up before it launches the new mobile payments system. Sources told Recode that Apple has held discussion "with multiple credit card networks" about the new payment system. The Information previously reported that Visa had agreed to work with Apple, Recode noted.

Bloomberg followed with a report, also citing unnamed sources, that Apple is also partnering with Visa and MasterCard on the payment system, which would be enabled on the iPhone 6 by a short-distance wireless technology called near-field communication, or NFC. NFC, along with the Touch ID fingerprint recognition reader found on the most recent iPhone, will enable you to pay for items in a store with the touch of a finger.

Mobile payments, or the notion that you can pay for goods and services at the checkout with your smartphone, are poised to break into the mainstream if Apple and the iPhone 6 get it right.

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Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller declined to comment on the reports. We also contacted the credit card companies for confirmation. MasterCard declined to comment. We'll update this report if we hear back from the other two.

Wired was just the latest to report recently that the next iPhone would include mobile-payment capabilities powered by NFC. The technology and capability to pay with a tap of your mobile device has been around for years -- you can tap an NFC-enabled Samsung Galaxy S5 or NFC-enabled credit card at point-of-sale terminals found at many Walgreen drugstores in the US, for example -- but awareness and usage remain low.

Apple's visibility and massive user base - it already holds credit card data for about 800 million iTunes account holders -- could change that.

CNET's Roger Cheng contributed to this report.

Updated at 2:08 p.m. PT with Bloomberg's report about Visa and MasterCard also partnering with Apple. Also updated at 2:43 p.m. PT with Apple declining comment.

Tags: Apple Mobile About the author

Apple iPhone 6 expected to include mobile payments, NFC

The iPhone's Passbook app was a small step by Apple into the mobile-payments world. James Martin/CNET

There's more evidence Apple is diving into the world of mobile payments with its next iPhone.

Wired, citing people familiar with the matter, reported Thursday that NFC, or near-field communication, is coming to the hotly anticipated iPhone 6 and will power a new mobile-payment platform on the device. NFC allows for touchless, short-distance interaction between a mobile device and other objects, often used to allow payments at a register or a quick way for one phone to recognize another.

Amid the bevy of iPhone rumors coming out in the run-up to the smartphone's expected launch on September 9, the NFC prediction was already hinted at last month by other publications.

If these rumors are true, the change could allow Apple to catch up to its chief rival, Samsung, in offering the technology. A few years ago, Samsung highlighted the absence of NFC in iPhones when trying to pitch its Galaxy smartphones. Many of Samsung's Galaxy phones can share content such as photos or a music playlist by simply bumping the backs of the phones together. NFC can also be used to pair smartphones to other devices, such as cameras and wireless headphones and speakers, simply by placing a phone in close proximity to compatible devices.

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Wired reports a new mobile-payment platform will be one of the "hallmark features" of the new device.

While Apple doesn't offer much so far in mobile payments, the company did take a small step in that direction with Passbook, a service launched in 2012 that brought together a person's loyalty cards, coupons, and event tickets on the iPhone. Passbook doesn't include debit or credit card payment features.

Among the other rumored upgrades, most industry watchers expect the next iPhone to have two display sizes, a 4.7-inch model and a 5.5-inch model, larger than the latest 4-inch iPhone 5C and 5S phones. That new feature, again, is seen as an attempt to match other smartphone makers such as Samsung, which have been moving into larger displays in their newer models.

Apple declined to comment.

Tags: Apple iPhone Update Phones NFC Samsung Samsung Galaxy About the author
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