Apple Pay: The Worldwide Experience
I have been traveling the world since the beginning of November and I have now had an opportunity to use Apple Pay across many countries and cultures.
What is Apple Pay?
It is a contactless payment solution. An NFC chip inside iPhone or Apple Watch is used to establish an encrypted connection between a payment terminal and the device. Any terminal with the Apple Pay or NFC Payment logo supports it.
In my opinion, once it’s set up, which is a fairly simple process, Apple Pay is an incredible user experience. Not simply from the design perspective, there is not much to see there, other than placing your phone near a terminal and authorizing a transaction with a thumb. UX in this case is more than meets the eye.
Apple Pay is fantastic because it completely solves one of the biggest consumer pain points and that is credit card fraud. We have seen this time and time again as companies such as Target, Home Depot, AT&T, Chick-fil-A, Staples, act in completely irresponsible ways when handling sensitive customer data. Each year there’s a big headline of a major hacking and how tens of millions of credit cards have been stolen.
I can’t overstate the importance of solving this problem. It’s a big deal in the US and it hit closely to home for me because when I embarked on my trip around the world I realized I would be a huge scam target. Card skimmers and all sorts of other tricks are thrown at unsuspecting tourists. On a normal week-long trip this wouldn’t be a huge issue, but when you’re gone for months you don’t have the time and resources to deal with credit card fraud and shipping of a new card when you’re constantly on the move.
There were two common themes I picked up regarding Apple Pay on my trip: (1) nearly everyone supports it, and (2) nobody knows what it is.
Nearly everyone supports it
This was the biggest surprise to me when traveling abroad. Besides Japan which is oddly enough a mostly cash society, almost all retailers small and big support Apple Pay. In Australia it was difficult to find any merchants that don’t support it. The NFC logo was plastered everywhere, even on vending machines.
New Zealand was much the same story. Even gas stations in middle of woods powered by what I imagine is a giant squirrel running in a spinning wheel had Apple Pay support (take note Best Buy…).
Turkey was a bit tougher. I intentionally went with cash there because I mostly wanted to eat baklava and street food which doesn’t really lend itself well to credit card micro-transactions.
Greece, Italy and Spain — they all had pretty extensive Apple Pay support.
Nearly nobody knows what it is
Now for the bad news. Most of the time I was the first and only person to use Apple Pay. I felt like I had come from the future and people just had no idea what was going on. My favorite reaction was in New Zealand when I was picking up some groceries and I made my payment.
“Whoa! What the hell did you just do!?”
That was my favorite reaction and it was not the only one of that kind that I got. Time and time again people were at worst shocked or at best ambivalent. If they were interested at all the next question was “Is it safe?”
At that point I’d go into my little spiel about how credit card data is stored on a physically separate chip (unlike Android) so even if someone were to hack into the phone remotely they could not retrieve anything from the phone itself.
I received this same reaction of surprise at places I least expected such as the Mandarin Oriental in Barcelona. It’s a 5-star hotel where I imagine most clientele are rocking a flagship Android or iPhone capable of NFC payments. Yet when I got up to pay at the register the concierge informed me this was the first time she’s seen anyone do this.
Apple Pay in the US
Apple Pay is in a sad state in the US. Many terminals are old and don’t support NFC, and those that could (Best Buy, CVS, Target and Walmart) have intentionally disabled it in favor of their own laughably insecure solution.
I also have not seen Apple push Apple Pay very hard. In all of my travels I saw only one ad in Melbourne for Apple Pay. In fact, Apple Pay is only technically supported in US, UK and by Amex in Australia. So, although the terminals abroad all support it, the banks do not. The opposite is true in the US. Nearly all major and regional banks support Apple Pay at this point but our infrastructure does not.
It’s a shame as I think the technology is phenomenal and really has the potential to change people’s lives. The few seconds saved at the register is nice and not having to sign for anything due to biometric security is also great. However, saying goodbye to identity theft and credit card fraud is a big deal and something I feel Apple should push hard on customers.
