Pay, coming September

After conducting a little research, and in light of some recent news stories, I’ve concluded we wont be seeing Pay in the UK before September.

The first article of interest was the nugget Visa dropped on us about introducing ‘Tokenisation’ to Europe in April. Basically, the clever technology that allows you to use a random credit card number every time you make a payment (why we really need that in the EU what with Chip and PIN is beyond me).

So that’s coming in April. Good.

Now, my own research…

The UK Cards Association (UKCA) recently announced that the contactless payment limit in the UK would increase to £30 in September of 2015. This is great news (for those who have grudgingly accepted that unlimited contactless payments aren’t going to happen in the foreseeable future).

For me though, this raised the question of how the limit actually works. If it’s applied by the card then there’s no problem, but if it’s enforced at the card reader, how on earth would we be able to pay using Pay?

I took it upon myself to ask the UKCA. The response:

The limit would be programmed into the card reader.

This worried me slightly, as I am only too well aware of establishments like (but not specifically) the UKCA’s ability to mess up technological developments like this. So I delved a little deeper and asked how this would affect higher value payments with services like Pay.

From next September it is expected that higher value contactless payments (like the iPhone 6 or Watch will be enabled on card readers in the UK. Consumers with mobile devices that emulate contactless cards and support customer verification (like TouchID) will be able to make purchases above the £30 limit…

Riiiight… So (ignoring the ‘expected’ part) from September it should be possible for us Brits to make high value purchases using contactless tech. I’m going to make the assumption that this update will roll out with the £20 to £30 change that is coming in September.

Great news!

The problem…

The problem is, I can’t see Apple launching their flagship payment service without the ability to make payments above a pewny £20 limit. This will doubtless be a disappointment, since I imagine they would very much have liked Apple Pay in Europe to have launched alongside the Watch.

This is all of course without taking into account Tim Cook’s recent statement that their target to get Pay into Europe was ‘end of year’, only going further to re-enforce my argument.

So, despite fervently hoping, I’m resigned to the prospect of not actually getting round to using Pay with my iPhone 6, because by the time it finally arrives we’ll be staring into the eyes of the 6S.