After an initial Amex-only launch last month, Apple Pay is seeing a full roll-out today in Singapore, with Visa, MasterCard and five major banks on board. This makes Singapore the sixth country to get Apple Pay, after the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia and China.
Apple Pay vice-president Jennifer Bailey told The Straits Times: “Now, almost everyone can leave their wallets at home. Apple Pay will be a natural extension of what users have been doing at payment counters” […]
Citibank, HSBC, ANZ and Maybank still do not work with Apple Pay [but] Ms Bailey said Apple is working to bring more banks on board.
Singapore was a good target for Apple, as contactless payment is already extremely well-established in the country …
Visa advises that a third of all credit and debit card transactions at retail stores are made with contactless cards, which are accepted in 30,000 stores.
The five banks are POSB, DBS Bank, OCBC Bank, United Overseas Bank (UOB) and Standard Chartered Bank, which account for 80% of card transactions in the country.
Most Apple Pay transactions in the country are currently limited to SG$100 ($72), but one of the five banks, UOB, says that it has lifted the cap for retailers who use its payment-processing services.
Apple has teased that Spain and Hong Kong are also in line to get Apple Pay at some point this year (Spain currently supports it for Amex only), with Tim Cook also recently talking about plans to bring it to India. France, Japan and Brazil are also all said to be close to the top of the company’s global roll-out plans.
U.S. expansion continues, with more than two dozen additional banks added just last week. Additionally, it looks like like BMO is joining the Apple Pay party in Canada, as one of our readers spotted in an app update – thanks, Greg.
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