Apple Pay expands with dozens of US banks & credit unions

And yet the list of retailers accepting Apple Pay is pretty small with some of the retail giants not accepting it at all.

lkrupp said:

And yet the list of retailers accepting Apple Pay is pretty small with some of the retail giants not accepting it at all.

We have very different ideas what small means. At this point in the US, the only purchases I'm not able to use Apple Pay frequently is with online sales. I'd really like to get rid of these companies that keep a copy of my credit cards and/or bank routing and account numbers on their servers, but those will be surely be the last of the dominoes to fall. 

Right now, the only time I ever have to use a physical card with a local merchant is when it's on the fringe of merchants that are still using old setups like Square in the 3.5mm headphone jack at something like the farmer's market or with a few major corporations with old Windows-based registers with built-in card swipes. Of course, there are still some hold out like CVS, Walmart, Target, and Home Depot that many people use often, but the majority of retailers do accept Apple Pay (with many smaller ones not even knowing it) so I don't think it's fair to say that it's small. Perhaps a better measure would be to use typical scholastic grading scale where you don't even get a 'C' grade until you're about 70–75%.

In most other Western countries NFC is already at an 'A' grade with the banks being the hold up for Apple Pay (and all the other *Pay systems) from being ubiquitous.

Give it time. This is a massive change to how exchange currency that needs support from merchants, multinational financial services (e.g.: MasterCard and Visa), banks, and customers. This was always going to take many years to reach a tipping point to where we stop being surprised that a merchant takes *Pay to where we're surprised that a merchant doesn't take *Pay. iOS 11.2 will likely help further that as you'll be able to use a company you can trust over Square, PayPal, or Venmo (Google).

Will Apple Pay Cash also allow for merchants to have device-to-device payments? If so, that will be a huge boon over having those attachments on devices, assuming Apple allows 3rd-party apps for the various types of merchant orders that will be necessary. If not with 11.2, I assume that will come down the road.

I have a SONY branded Capitol One card this still doesn’t support ApplePay. :-(

mrr said:

I have a SONY branded Capitol One card this still doesn’t support ApplePay. :-(

That seems to fall into the crack of being a merchant rewards card that can be used as a credit card and has Capital One and Visa doing transactions support. I think it's up to Sony to add support, which "feels" unlikely, to me, but I hope, for your sake, I'm wrong.

mrr said:

I have a SONY branded Capitol One card this still doesn’t support ApplePay. :-(

And I have a GM branded Capitol One card that isn’t supported either. I’m pretty sure now Capitol One doesn’t let any of its branded cards access to Apple Pay.