Apple Pay is coming to Starbucks

Apple’s Mobile Payment Service Coming to Starbucks

Vice President of Apple Pay, Jennifer Bailey, during the Code Mobile conference, had revealed that Apple Pay, Apple’s mobile payment service would be coming to Starbucks next year. Starbucks would be starting to pilot the service in some of the stores towards the end of 2015 and would be rolling it out to Starbucks company owned stores, around 7,500 by next year.

Bailey has informed that working on Apple Pay, she has seen great changes in momentum around acceptance at the merchant level, adding that about 80% of Apple Watch owners very actively tend to use Apple Pay. She said that Apple Pay would be hitting KFC restaurants in spring and Chili’s restaurants in 2016 as a pay at the table model.

The potential of turning smartphones into digital wallets with the ability of paying at the register had been advertised for years. Apple had kick-started consumer interest in the technology when it had launched its first project into contactless mobile payment last year. Less than 72 hours after the debut of Apple Pay, around 1 million credit cards had been utilised on the service.

Pay Through Near Field Communication - NFC

People can pay for products on the go at supported retailer through near field communication - NFC, technology with a new iPhone or Apple Watch. Besides this, other Touch ID enabled devices like the iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3 can also be used to pay for in-app transactions.

The iOS 9 update since last month enables users consolidated loyalty as well as rewards cards. The service tends to utilise a tokenization method which sends an encrypted digital token to stores rather than a credit or debit card number whenever a transaction has been made, which means merchants as well as retailers never get to view customer data.

 Mobile payments service of Samsung also works in the same manner. With around 500 financial institution partners together with 220,000 US merchant locations which tend to make mobile payment through NFC’s short range, secure wireless capabilities, Apple Pay had gone live in 2014. Towards mid-2015,over 2,500 banks had signed on to render support to Apple Pay with more than 1 million locations accepting Apple Pay.

Apple Pay – Two Thirds Contactless Payment – Radio Frequency

Apple Pay seems to be on track to be accepted at over 1.5 million US locations towards the end of this year. Apple had said that in January, Apple Pay made more than two-thirds of all contactless payments comprising of any device or smart card which makes payments utilising a radio frequency.

However, Apple has faced a lot of competition from Google which has been bulking up its Android Pay offering, together with Samsung which had introduced its Samsung Pay service in the US last month. The services of Samsung enables consumers to pay for products with their Galaxy phone and the impending Gear S2 smart-watch, tends to work at older retail depots that do not accept Apple Pay but thanks to the achievement of LoopPay in February.

Bailey had commented recently that she had been treated well as one of the few female executive at Apple. Bailey had been one of the two female executive highlighted on the stage in June at the time of Apple’s developer conference