Apple announced that it is expanding Apple Pay to allow nonprofit organizations and charities to accept donations via the mobile payments service and Apple Pay on the Web. The change takes effect immediately in the U.S.
Previously, charitable donations were barred on Apple Pay due to a lack of safeguards and the ability to validate the legitimacy of charities accepting donations. Charities can now embed donate buttons linked to users’ Apple Pay in their apps. Consumers will be able to use Touch ID to validate their contributions.
The addition comes just in time for the holidays, a time when, PayPal estimates, 62 percent of consumers will make a charitable donation. PayPal also predicts a 45 percent uptick in “Giving Tuesday” donations this year. And speaking of PayPal, Apple’s addition of charity and nonprofit donations allows it to start directly competing with the digital wallet giant in the charitable donations department. PayPal currently has close to 500,000 charities using the platform to accept donations.
Nineteen nonprofits are already working with Apple Pay, including the American Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, UNICEF and others.
Apple recently said that transactions on its contactless payments service were up 500 percent in Q3 and that it had completed more transactions in September of this year than in all of 2015.
Apple Pay is also finally scheduled to open to almost 4 million Australian users, despite boycott threats from four major Australian banks, following a partnership with payments company Cuscal. Happy holidays indeed.
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