In reply to Jeff Meredith.

“Their payment providers are just not offering it yet.”

Given that the U.S. leads in so many avenues of technology such situation is barely comprehensible; then, you have a lot more players involved and if consensus cannot be reached about the best way to control the weeds then invariably the weeds keep growing …

I think things are somewhat different in Australia, as a relatively small POS merchant at one time I only every dealt with my bank; not sure what happens with the larger retailers with scores of terminals; but I am not aware of the intermediary processors and equipment suppliers that appear to abound in the U.S.

We have had Chip+PIN mandated since August this year, and it appears to work well …

Logically, chip+signature never saw the light of day in Australia; then, that may be because there are a lesser number of players involved; here, the Australian big four banks basically control the market …

Apple’s clear advantage is its brand and its marketing ability, and probably, even more materially, all its fanboys; as I have previously said, never before have I felt such a rush of hot air; there was even talk from some idiot commentators of Apple killing off the existing credit card systems! …

No doubt Apple Pay offers an effective level of security, but its strange that the U.S. banks are falling over each other to endorse same, rather than promoting what is effectively their own new system wallets, “MasterPass” and “Visa Checkout” …

My form of logic tells me that “MasterPass” and “Visa Checkout” will win out in the end because they are the perfectly logical and natural extensions of the existing credit card services—for which there is effectively no alternative for physical point of sale transactions; and the potential “mobile” payments market is much bigger than the relatively expensive iPhone alone can ever service, and surely no one but a dedicated fanboy is going to rush out to buy a new iPhone simple to make payments via it …

Yes, it’s estimated that the U.S. processes ~33% of the world’s credit card payments but has ~50% of the world’s credit card fraud; from that point then it’s not hard to see why U.S. banks are happy to promote the greater security of Apple Pay at only a 0.15% fee; still, credit card details still remain available to be exploited by fraudsters; I look forward to the day when the credit card number becomes non-operational for card-not-present purposes; indeed, with the advent of tokenization, for all purposes …