Apple Pay officially launches this coming Monday and VP and CIO of McDonald’s, Deborah Hall-Lefevre, is flipping the switch on about 14,000 McDonald’s drive-thrus and going live with Apple Pay.
While many would have some major concerns if things were to go wrong, Hall-Lefevre isn’t losing any sleep over it. “It’s really not that much of a rollout. We already have NFC terminals in more than 14,000 locations. We don’t have to change anything and there’s nothing new to test.” – Hall-Lefevre
Despite how rest assured Hall-Lefevre seems, that’s not completely true since McDonald’s tested Apple Pay at its Point of Sale lab in Oak Brook, III., and the results gave McDonald’s the green light to proceed with the deployment. However, since testing, Hall-Lefevre has been very confident in the next steps to come.
Hall-Lefevre is responsible for both the deployment and execution of the company’s technology strategy in the US and is also the point person for the Apply Pay implementation.
Hall-Lefevre claimed that getting corporate to signoff on Apple Pay wasn’t hard at all. She stated it was an organized effort between both IT and Marketing alongside senior level execs like McDonald’s Global Digital Office, Atif Rafiq, Global CIO, Jim Sappington and CEO Don Thompson.
McDonald’s has incorporated NFC-enabled PoS terminals, like MasterCard’s PayPass, Visa payWave and Google Wallet for 2+ years.
McDonald’s holds future plans to bring Apple Pay to its offshore locations as well, but there is no specific timeframe as of yet.
Hall-Lefevre confidently stated that McDonald’s does not store any customer data on its network; and the company trusts the security and privacy features Apple has built into the Apple Pay service.
The company is so confident in the security that Apple has implemented that it is not using any additional safety precautions beyond those provided by Apple and the rest of the financial payments network.
IDC Analyst James Wester claimed that a major reason why Hall-Lefevre is so confident and certain with Apple’s security safeguards is that Apple has a lot at stake, which includes an immense amount of potential earnings.
The new security developments Apple Pay: tokenization and fingerprint authentication are also strong features. It also doesn’t hurt to know that the financial services backing Apple Pay aren’t rookies and know what they’re getting into. “They know how to do it, and do it well.” – Wester
For additional news on Apple, visit the PYMNTS.com Apple Pay EcoSystem.
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