With Alipay making a European entry, what's happing with Apple Pay?
There has been quite a bit of excitement in the last week about the fact that Alipay (the third-party online payment platform with no transaction fees, launched in China in 2004 by Alibaba Group) is now making its presence known, albeit in limited form, in Germany. This is good news for Chinese tourists on trips to Germany who can now pay with their Alipay app at authorised retailers.
You can read more about this move of Alipay into the German retailers here and the usage of Alipay in certain German airports here. Actually, with the pound dropping so dramatically - perhaps UK retailers should be the ones accepting Alipay for all those Chinese tourists in London. Sorry, i digress…
What it did make me think though is that we have yet to see any kind of report from Apple over the state of Apple Pay in the UK. Now a full one year after its UK launch, Apple has yet to release any data on the payment service’s performance with British consumers. Not only that, as well as offering a new to pay, Apple Pay also offered customers security measures to give them peace of mind when when doing so. The fingerprint recognition software massively reduced the chance of thieves being able to access money in your account while an in-built tokenisation mechanism prevents retailers from receiving personal information about customers.
The fact that Apple CEO Tim Cook was quick to sing Apple Pay’s praises, when it was first launched in the US, does raise some questions as to why no data has been released pertaining to its performance in Britain. Due to typical Apple secrecy, it’s impossible to determine how well Apple Pay has performed in the UK.
The only figures we’ve been able to obtain come from the Transport of London’s figures from January 2016, showing a total of 3.2 million journeys were paid for using “mobile devices” in the first six months after Apple Pay was launched in the UK. At that time, the iPhone was the only mobile device with the ability to make contactless payments, so therefore we can assume Apple Pay was the payment method for these figures.
If Visa’s latest forecast is to be believed, the use of mobile payments by British consumers will grow by 60% in the next four years. This is enabling businesses, who may initially have had reservations about introducing Apple Pay, with a window of opportunity as we begin to see changes in consumer paying behaviours.
Recent research by Apadmi – exploring the relationship between the retail sector and mobile app technology – found that not only do 97% of British consumers bring their smartphones with them when shopping, but also that almost half (49%) are open to using mobile apps that can offer them modern payment options – such as Apple Pay.
With so much research pointing to the fact that UK consumers are open to new and innovative ways to pay and from what I am seeing, as we start peak tourist season, perhaps we should also be looking to non-UK/Europe centric payment applications to rival Apple Pay, too. Alipay, anyone?
Finally, a big thank you for all of those who attended the Contactless Britannia Charity Roundtables in London last week. Sorry that I had to pull out at the last minute due to unforeseen circumstances but I understand that it was a highly successful and educational session with great input for all involved.
Overall, the consensus was that the use of contactless in fundraising is less a question of if but rather when and that massive steps have been taken in the last 12 months. Cancer Research’s keynote on the day gave an impressive insight into how bright the future of contactless could be. Many of the technology experts present took away the wish lists from the many charities present - with the #1 wish being some sort of “contactless fundraising regulation secretariat” that would help all charitable organisations to overcome the regulatory obstacles in an aligned manner.
A big thank you to all the speakers and participants as well as our content partners on the day, the UK Cards Association, and I hope you all found it worthy of you time and attention. Thank you from the Contactless Intelligence team.
And a final, final thing... This newsfeed will now move into its bi-monthly format for the next seven weeks as annual leave comes around for the industry and news grows scarce over the mid-summer months. We will be returning to our full weekly schedule at the beginning of September so for the next few weeks I will see you fortnightly.
Until then,
Steve Atkins
Contactless Intelligence
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