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Apple unveils contactless payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone

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Re: Apple unveils contactless payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone

#641

Post by profmonocle »

munk-a wrote: post #635
profmonocle wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how it was in the early days of Uber, but these days Uber does background checks on drivers, and IIRC they have for quite some time. Is there really any reason to believe that cab companies would do a better job of weeding out horrible people than Uber? I can't imagine they do much more than a background check.

There is legal oversight and reporting required from conventional cab companies. And yes this was very much from the early days of Uber - when people cheered on the fact that they identified regulators and refused to book rides for them so they couldn't formally record violations.

Oh holy christ, I hadn't heard of them doing that. Doesn't shock me, sadly.

Re: Apple unveils contactless payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone

#642

Post by vineyardmike »

girvo wrote: post #557
lostcolony wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not even sure there, at least for another few years. No store, mom and pop or otherwise, would want to be "tap to pay only" as a means of taking credit card payments. There are still plenty of cards out there that don't have RFID chips.

Wow really? That’s surprising for some reason. Here in Australia that’s super common, RFID is in every card you can think of. If I go to the farmers market on the weekend, they all accept cash or tap-to-pay with a Square tap-only reader, and that’s it.

Yea... the Apple Card doesn't have RFID chips.

Re: Apple unveils contactless payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone

#643

Post by vineyardmike »

pwinnski wrote: post #571
gleenn wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Apple credit card only shows the number if you reveal it in Apple Wallet app. Their card, technically run by Goldman Sachs, is all white with no numbers. Not sire how to verify but I've heard if you use it with Apple Pay I think it doesn't use that number, but a rotating one.

It can use a rotating number, I think, but when I tap my watch, any receipt with shows me the last four digits still shows me the same last four digits. Apple rotates the CVV, but not the card number so much.

Are you doing it with the Apple Card or just Apple Pay?

Re: Apple unveils contactless payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone

#644

Post by throwaway22032 »

dkonofalski wrote: post #485
throwaway22032 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's significantly more complicated because there's a protocol and negotiation involved. If I want to give you $1, I hold my hand out and there it is. I can literally stuff it into your back pocket. You're not involved in the exchange, there is no exchange. We can even do it UDP style - imagine that I check out of a hotel room and leave a dollar on the bedside table for the room staff. There's not even an ack. By con…

The user doesn't know that any of that stuff is going on, though, and you don't need data for this to work. It's not anywhere near as complicated as you're making it out to be. Those saying "I had to go to an ATM" are simply voicing a legitimate downside of cash that this doesn't have because you only have to get an iPhone once whereas you have to go to an ATM/bank every time you need cash.

How can you not know it's going on?

I'm at your house and I've just done a thing for you. You want to give me some money.

This is the protocol: "Hi, can I pay you for this?" "Sure." "Do you have an iPhone?" "Yes." "Okay, here you go." .

This is assuming I actually have one. Otherwise you have to do a fallback method.

Contrast with the protocol for cash:

.

It's the same amount of effort as the very final step of the other protocol.

There is no fallback here because I can guarantee that I have cash.

The whole thing is just obviously overcomplicated. If you like cards and phones and stuff because they're techy, that's cool man. I like tech too.

But it's utterly false that they're somehow simpler or more convenient. They work in some specific golden paths whereas the only case in which cash doesn't work is online.

The whole ATM problem you're describing is also super contrived, you may as well say that baked beans are difficult to eat because every time you eat one you need to buy one. Well sure, but you don't buy them one by one do you.

And it's not as if the only place a person gets cash is an ATM, everyone who I pay or who pays me has just gotten cash from.... not an ATM.

I dunno man, whatever, this is just a really weird thread in general, it's like you're treating cash as this magical archaic thing Grandad used to use when to me it's an integrated part of my everyday life.

Is this one of those "Cus COVID" things that don't actually make rational sense but apparently loads of people do it now just "Cus"?

Re: Apple unveils contactless payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone

#645

Post by globalise83 »

Crosseye_Jack wrote: post #637
zumu wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can always take a competitive stance later, once small businesses have gotten rid of all their PoS hardware. This makes that initial adoption much easier.

While it will reduce how often card readers will be used, card readers will be around for a while yet. In many markets contactless (atlest with real plastic) still has limits requiring the card holder to validate themselves (in the UK it’s a max of £100 per transaction and £200 over multiple transactions) and some card holders dislike contactless completely so have cards without it. So in those markets you will still…

True, but there is nothing to prevent completing biometric or PIN authentication on your own phone once you have tapped on the merchant's is there?

Re: Apple unveils contactless payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone

#646

Post by globalise83 »

pedalpete wrote: post #611
sebzim4500 wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you concerned about a malicious employee using their own iphone to steal the money? Why couldn't they give you their own square terminal? On that note, when you pay cash why can't they just pocket whatever you give them? I don't see why you care anyway, they would be stealing from the store, not from you. You would already have whatever item you are buying.

So, yes, it is a concern about a malicious actor. Likely an employee, but hey, with just an iPhone and a big enough store, can't anyone just pretend to be an employee? I would like to go to a store where I trust the business, the employee, and the entire pipeline. I understand that is idealistic, but yes, this is how I feel. It's like saying "why do you care if the employee is underpaid, you're saving money", which d…

To accept the payment successfully you must have a merchant account and have completed some KYC with one of Apple's payment partners though, surely?

Re: Apple unveils contactless payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone

#647

Post by hoten »

profmonocle wrote: post #209
melling wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The long slow road to contactless payments. Almost 2 decades along in the technology adoption curve. I was ready for this in 2005. https://money.howstuffworks.com/personal-finance/debt-manage... If course as the article points out, it wasn’t even new technology back then: “ Not Exactly New Tech Mobile introduced the Speedpass in 1997. Speedpass is a small device on a keychain (called a fob) that users wave in front o…

Something I was thinking about the other day is how some modern credit cards technically have four different ways to pay. Swiping pressure-sensitive paper over the raised numbers (the original method) is still possible, though I haven't seen a merchant actually do this since maybe the mid-2000's. Then you have magstripe, chip, and RFID all in the same card. Pretty impressive backwards compatibility, although I think…

> Swiping pressure-sensitive paper over the raised numbers (the original method) is still possible

I actually had to do this in 2013! Working as a waiter at Chili's, whenever the power went out (happened once or twice the year I worked there) we'd dig out a quite heavy apparatus and make carbon copies of the credit cards. Every time I used it, my customers commented they'd never seen such a thing before (I suppose the clientele was either too young or had bad memories).

Earlier last year, I was at Shake Shack when their online payment system went down. They decided to just stop charging people (even if they had cash!) and gave out free meals. I much prefer that system.

Re: Apple unveils contactless payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone

#648

Post by bobberkarl »

pdpi wrote: post #466
bduerst wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I think it was Apple refusing to fully support NFC until 2016 that prevented the market from jumping on contactless payments, at least in the US. They were holding something like a third of the market back from doing it which really made selling adoption to merchants difficult.

Contactless bank cards were widespread in the UK before Apple or Google had their own payment systems. I think the "real story", as it were, is that the banking industry held contactless payments way more than Apple ever did.

This is not true!

Sorry for the passion but i was involved in the mobile payment scene at the time. It was not the banks halting the development of mobile payment. It was: 1- Apple 2- MNOs (Mobile Network Operators) 3- Samsung

Apple closed off the iphone NFC api which dried up VC funding in the mobile payment scene. This is one of the reason we have QR Codes everywhere today, and not NFC tags.

To securely process mobile payment, you needed to have a secure enclave (SE) on the phone which would keep encryption keys safely. At the time, the MNOs wanted that secure enclave to be the SIM card, so they could control that space. Google retaliated by cutting some circuitry between the SIM Card and the phone: the SWI lines. Banks were charging north of a million $ to embed applications in the SIM Cards, and were charging you the same for any update. Apple at the time started charging 4 million $ as a deposit to acquire a special nfc permission (walmart and starbucks had one) to emulate a credit card.

Samsung was the worst. They were already embedding a Secure element in their phones without giving access to it. They started 2 or 3 years ago giving access to 3rd partys.

Re: Apple unveils contactless payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone

#649

Post by Crosseye_Jack »

globalise83 wrote: post #645
Crosseye_Jack wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it will reduce how often card readers will be used, card readers will be around for a while yet. In many markets contactless (atlest with real plastic) still has limits requiring the card holder to validate themselves (in the UK it’s a max of £100 per transaction and £200 over multiple transactions) and some card holders dislike contactless completely so have cards without it. So in those markets you will still…

True, but there is nothing to prevent completing biometric or PIN authentication on your own phone once you have tapped on the merchant's is there?

For me personally, I only use my real plastic when my battery is low on my phone. So you have to account for times may not have their phone with them.

My bank allows for location based security. If my phone is not near the location the card is being used I then have to use chip and pin instead of contactless (dead battery, poor cell service, unable to get a decent location fix because of the building, all these can trigger the need to revalidate).

And a lot of people still don’t have banking apps on their phone (one of the reasons banks had to support SMS 2FA when implementing Strong Customer Authentication).

I’m not too sure if the banks/ Visa/MC would be too happy allowing users to enter their pins on the retailers phone as pin pads are supposed to be encrypted.

We are seeing cards come with biometrics and pin pads on them, these cards will help with “card terminal less” transactions, but both bans will have to start issuing them and card users will have to be happy using them (I still know quite a few people who refuse to use contactless at all).

So imo those BlueTooth card terminals will be with us for a while to come, they will just be used less, which is why imo Apple worked with partners who already have such terminals as a fall back for whenever contactless can’t be used.

Re: Apple unveils contactless payments via Tap to Pay on iPhone

#650

Post by alwillis »

monkeynotes wrote: post #412
anonymouse008 wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real news is Apple specifically took a non competitive stance — making the API available to third parties like Stripe - rather than building in house, leveraging Apple Card connections, or similar

I am surprised Apple didn't make this a closed system and compete with Square for small businesses.

I am surprised Apple didn't make this a closed system and compete with Square for small businesses.

Apple isn't Microsoft. When was the last time Apple created something consumer facing from scratch instead of using industry standards or market leaders if they exist? They generally don't explicitly compete with commodity businesses unless there's something unique they're attempting to accomplish. They do stuff just because they can.

They partnered with the banks to create Apple Pay.

They partnered with Goldman Sachs and MasterCard to create the Apple credit card.

Besides, it would be a huge undertaking to build out a payment platform like Square to compete with them. Of course they could have bought any number of payment processors if they wanted to if they wanted to go that route.

Stripe and Shopify already have millions of customers so it only makes sense to partner with them.

The obvious thing most people on this thread is this being the basis for Apple's cryptocurrency aspirations.

Tim Cook owns some and he said Apple as a company is looking into cryptocurrency [1]. It only makes sense that Apple will eventually support bitcoin and other transactions natively on the iPhone, peer to peer.

[1]: "Tim Cook said Apple is looking at cryptocurrency – Here’s what the company is likely to do" https://9to5mac.com/2021/12/28/comment-tim-cook-said-apple-i...

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