The Bank of America and Wells Fargo are reportedly working on adding Apple Pay support to their cash machines this year.
Wells Fargo and Bank of America have teamed up to incorporate Apple Pay into their cashpoints, TechCrunch reported. According to the unknown person familiar with the project, both companies are developing the technology that will enable the use of the mobile payment system at their ATMs.
Although neither of the companies confirmed that they would work with Apple Pay, it’s most likely that banks are integrating the service.
“We’ve been working on the technology that allows us to hook to digital wallets, leveraging NFC on mobile phones to replace the card at the transaction at the ATM. Right now the wallet that we support is Android Pay,” said Jonathan Velline, Wells Fargo’s head of ATM operations.
“But we’re also looking at lots of different mobile wallets and evaluating which ones are going to be appropriate for our customers. We’ll likely add more mobile wallets throughout the year. We recognize our customers are going to have lots of different types of wallets based on their device, based on their bank, based on their OS, and we’re going to continue to find the right balance of which wallets we’re going to support. Right now the initial launch is with Android Pay, but that doesn’t limit us from considering other mobile wallets,” he continued.
Speaking to TechCrunch, Bank Of America’s Consumer Banking Products press representative Betty Riess said: “We already have number of mobile wallet programs…”, what means Apple Pay support could be added by the bank. Moreover, iPhone is now the most popular phone in the country.
Riess confirmed that the bank is working on a new ATM solution that will allow customers to reap the benefits of the NFC support. The Bank of America is going to launch new ATMs later this month in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Charlotte. The wider deployment is planned in the middle of 2016.
Wells Fargo, meantime, didn’t give any information on when it will roll out the NFC payment solution. The company owns over 12,800 ATMs nationwide, while the Bank of America has more than 16,000 ATMs across the US.
The integration with Apple Pay will help banks to save money by providing advanced fraud protection. The security offered by the service is much higher if compared with credit cards.
Depending on the settings, Apple Pay can require a fingerprint as a passcode, which is almost impossible to duplicate. Besides, unlike debit cards’ 4-digit pin codes, Apple Pay’s passcodes can be complex and long.
The NFC technology eliminates the need to carry credit cards, which can be stolen by criminals. Instead of inserting credit cards into ATMs, people will be able to use machines by tapping their phones to the NFC point.
These security features, along with convenience of usage, will likely urge banks to integrate Apple Pay.
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