NFC-based mobile payments have had a boost in recent months, possibly thanks to the launch of Apple Pay, which was announced in September. Now, a person with knowledge of the matter tells Ars that Google Wallet, which launched back in 2011 and saw tepid success in the ensuing three years, has had considerable growth in the last couple of months. According to our source, weekly transactions have increased by 50 percent, and in the recent couple of months, new users have nearly doubled compared to the previous month.
Although it's still unclear whether Apple Pay will gain the critical mass of users necessary to become a true checkout stand alternative, Tim Cook recently said that one million cards were activated on Apple Pay in the first 72 hours of the platform's launch (although ReadWrite notes that one million cards is hardly a revolution). It seems that interest in the platform is buoying Apple's predecessor among Android users as well. Although there are some key differences in the way the two platforms work behind the scenes, the experience from the average user's perspective is close to identical.
Retailers want in on the game
The reinvigorated interest in using a phone to pay at a merchant's terminal has also fueled a bit of outrage toward retailers’ consortium Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) and its competing payments platform called CurrentC.
After Apple Pay’s debut two weeks ago, CVS and Rite Aid, two pharmacies that had long supported NFC payments from Google Wallet and contactless credit cards, abruptly stopped taking payments from Apple's and Google’s platforms in support of CurrentC. The retailers' payments scheme would use QR codes sent to a user’s phone to verify purchases and help retailers avoid paying fees to merchant acquirers on credit and debit card transactions.
That decision sparked anger among loyal customers, who bristled at the idea that retailers were actively disabling a convenient feature that had existed in these stores for years with Google Wallet. That bad press was made worse when MCX announced that the e-mails of some early subscribers to CurrentC had been stolen.
As details leaked out over the next week, it appeared as though MCX had asked its members to sign an exclusivity agreement which would ban Apple Pay and Google Wallet at terminals in favor of the less popular (and still not-yet-publicly-released) CurrentC.
In an interview with Walt Mossberg recently published on Re/code, CEO of MCX Dekkers Davidson is now saying that the exclusivity agreement was only meant to give “breathing room” to the nascent CurrentC, and that retailers who agreed to exclusivity would see the ban on Apple Pay and Google Wallet expire in “months, not years.” This statement suggests that retailers like CVS, Rite Aid, and others might be able to restore Apple Pay and Google Wallet transactions in the near future.
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