Tag Archives: Apple Pay

Apple Pay for public transit coming to the US later this year

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Apple announced today that Apple Pay will be coming to mass transit systems in major US cities later this year. Portland, Chicago and New York City will be the first to support the payment service, which will allow passengers to quickly pay fares wit...

America’s cash-free future is just around the corner

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Shake Shack's next burger joint at Astor Place in NYC doesn't want your money -- at least not the physical variety. In an effort to reduce the "friction time" between paying for your meal and eating it, the company plans to replace human cashiers for...

Apple Pay Rival ‘CurrentC’ Gets Hacked, Email Addresses Stolen

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CurrentC

With Apple Pay now taking off, the service’s biggest competitor CurrentC has just been hacked.

Announced back in September alongside the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, Apple Pay is the payment service that hopes to replace your wallet. Set to bring all of our payment options together, the benefits of Apple’s new payment project are great.

Except, that is, for Apple Pay’s biggest competitor. Called CurrentC, the Apple Pay rival is run by the retail group MCX (which includes Walmart, Rite Aid and CVS Health) and is connected to people’s checking accounts rather than their credit cards.

CurrentC’s plans to thwart Apple Pay became visible earlier this week when several MCX retailers refused to put Apple Pay systems in their stores, causing severe backlash from critics and consumers. It seems that the service has now hit another snag though, as CurrentC has just been breached by a hack.

Taking place just yesterday, the CurrentC breach enabled hackers to steal user email address. Luckily, as CurrentC is still in testing, those figures aren’t terribly large but as the email address appear to have been stolen via a hack of the service’s backend rather than with email phishing (which tricks users into providing their info) there appears to be plenty to worry about.

In an email to users, MCX said the following,

“In an abundance of caution, we wanted to make you aware of this incident and urge you not to open links or attachments from unknown third parties. Also know that neither CurrentC nor Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) will ever send you emails asking for your financial account, social security number or other personally identifiable information. So if you are ever asked for this information in an email, you can be confident it is not from us and you should not respond.”

And, while they also added that they are “continuing to investigate this situation” this will be little solace to those already concerned about the service.

People are already doubting CurrentC because of the large amounts of data it gathers from customers and their purchases, feeding that data back to the retailers and allowing them to use it for profit gains (e.g by changing pricing, marketing and possibly even sharing it with partners). Apple Pay on the other hand is completely anonymous with its data, which some would agree is a much safer option.

So this hack will only validate those concerns then because if they struggle to keep a hold of email addresses now, how will this pan out when payment data and other more precious customer info is in the system? CurrentC is still in testing mode but security will absolutely need to fixed before the service launches.

We’ll keep you posted once we know more.

Source: TechCrunch

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How to Use Apple Pay Outside of the United States

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Apple Pay

Launched earlier this month, Apple Pay is the U.S only payment service. Here is a way to use it outside of the country.

Pretty big deals in their own right, one of the biggest things that the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus have gifted us (besides those ginormous, sometimes bendy screens) is NFC. NFC, or Near Field Communication, allows your phone to communicate wirelessly with other devices around it.

Specifically, the NFC of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus will allow us to use Apple Pay. An easy to use payment service, the idea with Apple Pay is that it will put all of our payment details (PayPal, debit cards, credit cards etc.) in one place and lets us pay with those at the till instead of fishing out the appropriate card, wallet or amount of coinage.

Such a big deal is Apple Pay, that Apple has even said that the service could replace wallets altogether. But there’s just one problem: it’s only available in the United States. That doesn’t mean that you can only use it in the USA however, as the ability to use Apple Pay around the world is as simple as choosing the right credit card.

When adding cards to Apple Pay, as long as you make sure that they are United States credit cards (registered to US addresses) you will be able to use them across Europe and in other continents where retailers have NFC systems set up. Granted, you may incur additional charges as a result of using your United States credit card abroad but if you don’t want to take your cards on holiday with you or find yourself without another way to pay whilst you’re out of the country, it could make the difference between buying goods and leaving the store empty handed.

Furthermore, there’s hope that this will soon stop being an issue. Visa Europe has said that they are “working closely with Apple and with our member banks to bring this new service to market in Europe” and sources suggest that Apple Pay will be rolled out to China sometime soon. So as always, we’ll keep you posted.

Source: MacRumors

Be social! Follow Walyou on Facebook and Twitter, and read more related stories, 4 Amazing Product Reveals from Apple’s iPad Event, Apple and Bono Working on ‘Secret Project’ to Fight Music Piracy

Apple Pay Enables Paying With your iPhone

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Apple PayOne of the major announcements coming out of Apple’s meeting on Tuesday was another anticipated technology from both retailers and consumers called Apple Pay. This feature will be built into the iPhone 6 coming later this month and the Apple Watch being released early next year.

Apply Pay will build on the Passbook app and will incorporate a near field communication (NFC) antenna allowing consumers to pay at the counter by a simple tap. The iPhone 6 will also incorporate Touch ID to get the fingerprint of the consumer for added security and Apple also included something called the Secure Element, which is a dedicated chip to store encrypted payment information on the device.

In order to help with adoption, which has been difficult with this type of technology in the past, Apple is making it easy to incorporate your credit card into the system by simply importing it from your iTunes account or adding it in by scanning your physical card with the iSight camera.

Apple says Apple Pay will work with American Express, Mastercard, and Visa and already has a number of partners including Macy’s, Walgreens, McDonalds. Disney and Subway. The company also stated the system works with the top bank issuers to handle 83% of the current credit card purchase volume. Apple has also announced the release of a development API for Apple Pay so the technology can be integrated into applications.

Apple is releasing Apple Pay in a software update being released in October and will only be available in the US to start.

Apple Pay