Apple Pay on pace to account for 10% of global card transactions

Another nice feature thing about Apple Pay (and maybe some others?) is automatic updating.

Some place I could not use Apple Pay with was involved in a breach, and so my bank notified me that I was getting a new card, and to start using it as soon as it came in the mail.

At about the same time as I got the email notice that this was happening, I got a notification on my iPhone that the card had been updating in Apple Pay to the new one. No action was required on my part.

I have no idea how they did that. I know there is a credit card updater service provided by at least Visa, MC, Discover, and AmEx that allows merchants with those cards on-file to ask for updates. We use that where I work, but the interface to it involves posting a file that contains one record per card we want updated in a fixed field format straight out of the punched char days (but wider than punched card). Then, typically in two or three days, a similar file comes back with update records for some of those cards. More updates trickle in that way over the next few days. And some never get a response.

Anyone know what it takes to get access to the kind of updates Apple is getting, where apparently the banks push the updates and they are very timely? Is this something only very high volume entities can get?

That's cool, but it must not be universal, because I've always had to re-setup my debit card.

Not particularly, anyone here who deals with sales for any amount of Americans will quickly see that they're the odd one out with contactless.

It's not that there's heaps of different scenarios, it's that there's America and the rest of the world.

> I've definitely had the last 4 digits printed out on a receipt. While it is conceivable that those were transmitted separately I find that somewhat unlikely.

I noticed this too. Some merchants print the last four of the device account number (DAN) and some print the last four of the actual primary account number (PAN).

I asked about it on /r/ApplePay [1]. /u/martialplum provided this explanation:

> Although the card number sent to the reader from in the transaction is the device account number, this gets de-tokenized along the way to your bank (either by the payment network or some third party) and the actual card number is the one used for authorization. Some issuers use the actual card number in the response they send back to the merchant (data element 2 in ISO 8583). Depending on how the card reader formats the receipt, it's not uncommon for merchant copies of the receipt to show the full device account number (expected), but show the last 4 of the actual card number for convenience when someone shows them the card on their device, which will show the same numbers.

The "ISO 8583" text in that was a link to this [2].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ApplePay/comments/bnedl7/receipts_a...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8583#Data_elements

Given the currently staggering inequality of wealth distribution on Earth, I would wager that the average revenue of Apple customers (arguably at least half the richest, trickling down to upper classes) is more than enough to make said customers' spending several times that of the average credit card owner (also increased purchase frequency).

That's what the story of Apple's market shares and image around the world seems to paint, anyway (the US is really an outlier, no other country buys anywhere near as many iPhones except Sweden, Japan and Switzerland iirc).

Apple is successfully pivoting into a luxury brand + service provider (let's call it the Porsche or Vuitton of consumer devices), and I think this article / thread goes to show that they've now effectively conquered their customers' wallet — as in, the product category.

Well played, hats off, but the genius really was in developing the strategy itself: suppose you have $200bn sitting in cash offshore that you can't bring back easily, and you also happen to have the 10-20% richest people on Earth as customers. Well, what can you do with those? ... Offer a financial service maybe, like payments? Tim Cook: hold my pad

I really do think the 5% figure might be every bit as real as the price tag of the latest flagships, as real as the kind of global wealth that allows casually spending ~4 figures on a phone in 2020.