Roger Fingas
On Tuesday Apple officially launched Apple Pay in Canada, simultaneously announcing two more supporting banks in the U.K., and a Thursday debut for the service in Australia.
Canadian payments are currently limited to American Express cards, and further exclude co-branded AmEx cards offered by Scotiabank and others. Transactions can be made at any retailer supporting AmEx's wireless payment system however, which includes major chains such as Tim Hortons, Indigo, Staples, Petro Canada, and McDonald's.
Online payments can be made in apps like Uber, Starbucks, Domino's, Groupon, and Priceline.
In the U.K. — which got Apple Pay in July — shoppers can now add cards from TSB or Tesco Bank.
Apple revealed the Australian launch date to the Financial Post, but didn't elaborate on any details, such as supporting merchants. As with Canada, though, American Express will be initial local card issuer.
The service will ultimately need to expand beyond AmEx in Canada and Australia, as most people in those countries use cards from other issuers, like Visa or MasterCard.
Apple is planning to bring Apple Pay to Hong Kong, Singapore, and Spain sometime in 2016. While the company has mostly succeeded in getting financial institutions on board with the service, merchant support has been comparatively lackluster. Regions like Canada and Europe are typically better equipped for wireless payments than the U.S. though, which could help.
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18 Comments
It is about time! Now lets see how long the banks take to jump on board. It should be very successful here as the infrastructure is already in place.
Big flipping whoop????. One credit card company isn't worth enabling the service. The bloody banks are too miserly to loosen the purse strings to let money head south of the border, even though we, as Canadians, would prove the value such a service, and the banks would get money. Albeit not as much as they want (100%), but they'd still get money. The idea that it's not secure is just a smokescreen to cover the greed of our banks. Oh well, I've gone this long with a crippled iPhone 6 Plus, I can go on longer.... M.
I'm in Canada this week, I'm going to check it out at Petro Canada service station today (which takes AMEX).
In the UK if you ignore take away food outlets there are not many other retail outlets apart from a few supermarkets. I don't have take awys so with the limit at 30 pounds l have not had much of a chance to use Apple Pay in shops yet. Years ago cheque guarantee cards had a limit of 50 pounds so why can't we have a more usable limit of say 100 pounds. I might then be able to use ApplePay.
In the UK if you ignore take away food outlets there are not many other retail outlets apart from a few supermarkets. I don't have take awys so with the limit at 30 pounds l have not had much of a chance to use Apple Pay in shops yet. Years ago cheque guarantee cards had a limit of 50 pounds so why can't we have a more usable limit of say 100 pounds. I might then be able to use ApplePay.
That's not my experience. Pretty much every shop I go into in London has NFC (and therefore Apple Pay) support.