According to Jennifer Bailey, head of Apple’s payment arm, the users of the app can make limitless mobile payments at the majority of vendors around the country.
Apple has announced that more than half of merchants in the UK now accept Apple Pay transactions of any value. As The Telegraph wrote in an article, Apple Pay users will be able to make purchases without carrying their wallets.
Previously, users of the payment platform had been restricted to purchases of £30 at most merchants in the UK. The limits were imposed to eliminate the risk of fraud, as users are not required to enter a PIN or sign a receipt. However, Apple’s authentication technology offers an advanced security to allow limitless transactions.
When Apple Pay was rolled out in the country two years ago, there were only a few vendors that accepted transactions of any value.
“We think the majority of the contactless terminals [in the UK] are now limitless,” Ms Bailey said in an article. The merchants that now accept limitless payments include restaurants, such as Pizza Express and Nando’s, and supermarkets, including Waitrose and Sainsbury’s.
According to Apple, the volume of transactions via the payment platform has significantly increased over the last year, with 23 banks now supporting the app. “Our momentum has been fantastic. We’re really excited about the progress,” Ms Bailey stated.
She also hinted that the company is working on a new technology that would replace other parts of the wallet apart from cards. “If you think about all the things in your wallet, we’re thinking about all those things, we’re probably actively working on most of them. We’re starting with payments. Some are longer term, we see this as a long term journey rather than something we can solve in the next 12 months,” she said.
After launching the platform in 2014, Apple has expanded it to 16 countries. The company intends its mobile payment solution to replace the traditional wallet. Last month, the company unveiled plans to launch its own P2P payment service
Apple Pay’s main rival, Google, launched Android Pay in the UK in 2016, while another competitor Samsung introduced its Samsung Pay platform last week. Meantime, Chinese payment platform AliPay has recently expanded to the US market.
The new report from Juniper Research predicts that debit and credit cards will continue to dominate contactless transactions, accounting for 80% in 2019. By 2020, the report forecasts, the contactless payments made via debit and credit cards will surpass $2 trillion worldwide. In general, the volume of contactless transactions will reach $1.3 trillion by 2019, rising from an estimated $590 billion in 2017.
“Purely from a payments and convenience perspective, it will be difficult for mobile wallet providers to gain existing market share from contactless cards,” said Nitin Bhas, the author of the report. “It is therefore incumbent upon them to deliver innovative services through which the mobile wallet will become the default payment mechanism.”
Last year, the majority of contactless transactions in the US were conducted with mobile wallets, while in Europe people mostly used their credit cards for contactless payments.
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