If you’ve ever tried
to buy anything in an Apple Store, you’ll know the company isn’t a fan of the
traditional checkout.
And if you’ve being paying attention,
you’ll know that Apple rolled out a new EasyPay system in its US stores last
year. That technology allows customers to pay for some products using an iOS
app and their Apple online store account. The idea is that you walk up to the
product you want, scan its barcode with the app and are then taken into the
online store to pay for it. If the item is available to take away from the
shelves, you’re done. If not, the app pages an assistant to retrieve it from
the stockroom.
There
have long been rumours that Apple will add an NFC (near field communications)
chip to its iOS devices so they can be used to make contactless payments in any
store that supports NFC
It’s a good start to automating payment,
but only a start. There have long been rumours that Apple will add an NFC
(near field communications) chip to its iOS devices so they can be used to make
contactless payments in any store that supports NFC. Google’s Wallet Android
app uses the NFC chips in some Android phones to make payments using a credit
card whose details are stored in the app. Swipe the phone at a reader and the
cost of your purchases is deducted from your credit card.
Using NFC for payment
You’ll have seen contactless terminals
appearing in shops over the last few months; they work with contactless credit
and debit cards too. And Barclays has recently launched the PayTag, an NFC
sticker that can be attached to any mobile device, or indeed a half-brick, for
convenience.
There are a number of problems with NFC,
however. For one, there’s no global standard. Also, you still need to wave your
thingy at the reader. That makes it only marginally more convenient than
swiping a credit card. Mass adoption of NFC will require retailers and credit
card companies to install newreaders in their stores and require consumers to
use a modern mobile phone.
Does that mean
contactless payments have no future? Not necessarily. Pablo Saez Gil, who works
for industry analyst ResearchFarm, believes that longer-distance payments could be the future. “We
think that cloud- based payment solutions will produce the largest number of
value benefits for retailers and consumers, cloud-basedpayments can gain mass
adoption overnight, as cloud-based payment solutions will arrive in the form of
mobile apps, be they digital wallets or mobile retailer apps,” he wrote in a blog
post.
Saez Gil points to Apple’s adoption of
Bluetooth 4 on all its iOS devices and Macs as evidence that it has given up on
NFC and will instead use Bluetooth to enable contactless payments. Using
Bluetooth, according to Computerworld’s Mike Elgan, would have a couple of
advantages over NFC. “Bluetooth can go into ultra-low-energy mode, passively
aking connections and transferring the information necessary to conduct a
financial transaction. And it can make those connections at much greater
distances than NFC can - up to 160 feet - eliminating the need for a customer
to go to a checkout counter to use an NFC reader.”
The ability to make payments from a
distance is key. You wouldn’t need to queue at a checkout, as you would with
NFC, or to swipe your phone at a reader. For retailers and credit card
companies, who are still toying with NFC, implementation would be easier: there
would be no need for expensive NFC readers; all that was required would be a
device that had Bluetooth 4 support.
iWallet
The fact that the technology is available
and less expensive than NFC doesn’t mean Apple has any plans to use it, of
course. But a patent granted in March suggests it’s at least considering it.
That patent, according to Patently Apple, is for something called iWallet,
which ‘reviews credit card transaction rules and shows us that the credit card
companies will be sending statements directly to your iTunes account.’
According to the patent, users would be able to purchase items, set spending
limits, store card details, and block specific retailers from within an app.
It may be that Apple plans to use iWallet
for nothing more than transactions in its own retail stores. But that would
seem a missed opportunity. Retailers, financial institutions and technology
companies have spent a decade or more trying to crack the problem of
contactless payments. If Apple has the solution, making it widely available
could be very profitable.
“The technology is available, andless
expensive than NFC... which doesn’t mean Apple plans to use it.”
