Apple Pay Restores the Wallet Back to a Style Accessory
The news feed for a men’s styling and clothing company that I follow on Facebook recently depicted an overstuffed wallet with the caption “Wallets are not miniature filing cabinets.” After having analyzed Apple Pay in my recent blog post about its business impact, the potential for it to become a game-changer for the digital wallet offering and effectively changing how payments are made and accepted, I wondered if I missed another aspect of the digital wallet – restoring the wallet to a styling accessory rather than a drawer.
After all, if Apple achieves what it listed out during the company’s September keynote event, this may soon be a reality for consumers like me who will no longer have to carry multiple cards in our wallets. And now that it has been officially launched, I have to ask – what is the impact to someone like me, as a consumer and not just someone who specializes in the financial services technology space?
On its official launch date of 20th October, I set out to configure Apple Pay on my iPhone 6 and at that point, I experienced my first – and last to date – real world hiccup. I have been following most of what has been written about Apple Pay, and I knew that the service would come as part of the iOS update on the launch date. But to my surprise, there was no update available on my phone until that evening.
In today’s 24/7 world of instant access, consumers including myself are impatient. We don’t want to wait and brands need to respond immediately. For an average consumer who buys an iPhone for reasons other than Apple Pay, Apple left a lot to the imagination on how to setup, and subsequently start using the service. To make matters worse, Apple’s website on the launch date still mentioned “Coming In October” and it still doesn’t showcase Apple Pay on the company’s home page or the website header. And here I am, looking for a service that is supposed to significantly alter the payments landscape. In my opinion, Apple could have done a better job at explaining how the average consumer accesses and uses Apple Pay. As a consumer, part of my on-boarding experience was less than spectacular – something that may spell doom, especially for firms in the online world looking to acquire consumers through digital channels.
Even though late by a day in setting up Apple Pay, it didn’t deter my child like exuberance of using it. I went along with a colleague who is an Android user to McDonald’s as it is one of the biggest merchants accepting Apple Pay and easier to find for first time use. So I ordered my French fries and waited impatiently for the cashier to prompt me to pay, as I was least interested in eating and drinking anything at that time. And to ensure that I did not get turned away due to non-acceptance, I informed the cashier I would be paying with my phone.
I purposely kept my phone locked, and much to my surprise, the moment I put the phone in the vicinity of the contactless reader, the touch ID popped up on my screen. I placed my finger on my phone, and within a couple of seconds, my phone vibrated, informing me that the payment was successfully completed. I was amazed and overwhelmed by the experience, as was my colleague who is now thinking about setting up Google Wallet on his Android phone.
The mobile payment space is not new, and Apple learned from Google’s mistakes. The infrastructure at McDonalds is the same as the one utilized by Google. And more importantly, the cashier didn’t seem oblivious to the technology — this is where Apple built on Digital Wallet’s early years of training the workforce on how to accept contactless payments. As a result, Apple didn’t have to spend considerable time training the merchant workforce.
Google Wallet was launched in 2011, and like Apple Pay, is NFC-enabled. But unlike Apple Pay, Google Wallet is yet to be adopted on a large-scale. However, Apple Pay may change that. How you may ask? Given the penetration of the Android market, overnight, consumers are not going to switch to the iPhone 6 just for a payment service. With Apple revolutionizing the digital wallet, more consumers on the Android platform will move to and adopt the Google Wallet – my colleague is a perfect example. What is a wow in today’s world will become a consumer expectation tomorrow.
My experience led me to wonder, what are other people using, what was the casher’s experience, what is lacking, what are the future uses for similar technologies, and how can digital transformation simplify our daily lives?
The future uses are boundless. For starters, Apple will simplify in-app purchases and the experience of shopping online through the convenience of a single TouchID-based checkout. This is the new world of payments, and as a consumer, it’s an experience full of delight..
Looking ahead, what better way to use my phone? Soon, I can replace my access card at work, my apartment key and my mass transit card to ride the subway. Digital technology is about making life easier, and Apple Pay is just the start. And for now, that my wallet has been digitally transformed, it can go back to being a style accessory.
~Faaiz Tameem is a Senior Consulting Manager (Financial Services) at Brillio. Follow him on Twitter @faaiztameem
