Apple Pay launches in Russia with support for Mastercard and one bank

Russia on Tuesday became the latest major market to gain access to Apple Pay, with iPhone, Apple Watch and iPad owners in the region now able to provision Mastercard credit cards and use the service at participating retailers.

Announced through Apple's regional website, Apple Pay is being introduced to the Russian market through partners Mastercard and Moscow-based Sberbank. Plans for expansion are not mentioned, though Apple typically extends access to a variety of credit card operators and multiple local financial institutions in the weeks and months following an initial availability.

At launch, participating retailers include ATAK, Auchan, Azbuka Vkusa, bp, Magnit, Media Markt, M.Video, TsUM and authorized Apple reseller re:Store. Touchless payments are expected to roll out at Electronics store Eldorado and Burger King in the near future.

Apple Pay can also be used for in-app purchases, and web-based payments with macOS 12.12, though it is unclear as to how many Russian-developed apps and online vendors feature such integration at this time.

Reuters reported on the Russia launch earlier today.

The arrival of Apple Pay in Russia is the latest development in a measured international rollout. Most recently the fledgling payments service was activated in Switzerland customers in July. A month earlier, Apple expanded backend integration to incorporate each of Canada's "big five" banking institutions, and before that Apple Pay gained support from five major banks in Singapore.

Apple Pay launched in the U.S. in 2014 and has since expanded to cover nine markets including Australia, Canada, China, France, Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland and the U.K. Today's addition brings the tally up to ten.

As Apple Pay continues to gain traction domestically, Apple is focusing future growth efforts in major markets in Asia and Europe. The endgame, according to Apple Pay chief Jennifer Bailey, is to deliver Apple Pay to every major market in which Apple products are sold.

Looking ahead, New Zealand is thought to gain access sometime this fall through a partnership with ANZ, which in April became the first of Australia's big four banks to adopt Apple's service. Reports last week claim the company is also in discussions to bring Apple Pay to Taiwan and Kenya.

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5 Comments

robertwalter 276 comments · 9 Years

About 8 years ago

As a shareholder, I'd have preferred the endgame be to offer AP in every market listed on Apple's store site.

If if your DNA is to bring life changing and enhancing tech to "people", you can't do them justice by bifurcating them into "major" and "minor" markets especially if you are officially in their market earning revenue off them.

Business necessarily consists of cherry picking but I have a hard time to make sense of it in this case.

airmanchairman 358 comments · 15 Years

robertwalter said:

As a shareholder, I'd have preferred the endgame be to offer AP in every market listed on Apple's store site.

If if your DNA is to bring life changing and enhancing tech to "people", you can't do them justice by bifurcating them into "major" and "minor" markets especially if you are officially in their market earning revenue off them.

Business necessarily consists of cherry picking but I have a hard time to make sense of it in this case.

Don't forget that participating websites worldwide (major or minor) can implement and use Apple Pay soon via the latest version of Safari. Rollout of a core service's infrastructure will always start with major outlets and branch outwards from there, not randomly. This hardly qualifies as cherry-picking, more like standard procedure of progressive rollout.

mike1 3432 comments · 10 Years

robertwalter said:

As a shareholder, I'd have preferred the endgame be to offer AP in every market listed on Apple's store site.

If if your DNA is to bring life changing and enhancing tech to "people", you can't do them justice by bifurcating them into "major" and "minor" markets especially if you are officially in their market earning revenue off them.

Business necessarily consists of cherry picking but I have a hard time to make sense of it in this case.

You make it sound like Apple works in a Vacuum. Any roll out or expansion of Apple Pay involves multiple partners with agreements to make and infrastructure changes that all must be implemented. Perhaps, in your view, they should have started with Malta or Uzbekistan, before the US, China, UK, Japan, Canada and Russia.

misa 827 comments · 13 Years

robertwalter said:

As a shareholder, I'd have preferred the endgame be to offer AP in every market listed on Apple's store site.

If if your DNA is to bring life changing and enhancing tech to "people", you can't do them justice by bifurcating them into "major" and "minor" markets especially if you are officially in their market earning revenue off them.

Business necessarily consists of cherry picking but I have a hard time to make sense of it in this case.

You know Russia is pretty much the "insanely-evil-and-corrupt country where the politicians are part of the criminal network" type of place right? I'm not sure about China. The places Apple rolls out Apple Pay typically have two things in common:
- A crappy domestic banking and payment system (US, Canada, Australia, All of Europe, and so forth)
- A general unwillingness of the banking and payment system to adapt.

In Asia, they've been using RFID cards for years, but most of them are still ass-backwards when it comes to payments not made with a transit pass. In the US, the banks have been dragging their heels in adopting secure payment methods, ultimately they decided on chip+sign which pretty much defeats the purpose of the chip card. So the next way to go is the NFC Token with a biometric. In Canada, we had chip cards and later NFC cards for years before the US, but the banks dragged their heels in rolling out cards (my credit union still hasn't rolled out a NFC card.)

Pretty much anyone in Canada will tell you that anything that sticks it to the big-5 banks (we don't have very many small banks at all unlike the US) is absolutely welcome. I'm sure markets like Japan and Korea would also love to use their phone for absolutely every transaction but there is just so much inertia (and cheapness) inherent in dealing with regular cash that they are resistant to change. So Apple has to pick markets to roll out Apple Pay where there is already a NFC solution, but the rest of the experience needs improvement.