An Amex card is no harder to get than a MC/Visa. Costco has done quite well in the relevant middle-class-american-suburb market with an Amex-only policy. This isn't the barrier.
The retail penetration, however, is the barrier. If you can't use these things mostly everywhere, this service is going to be no more successful than Google Wallet.
The whole advantage of Apple getting into payments is the fact that they have millions of credit cards for their customers. The advantage is muted if they require those customers to get new cards. It is quite safe to assume they are working to partner with all of the major credit card companies and AMEX happens to be one of them.
Chicken or the Egg... which comes first? That's one problem. Must support it in the phone (or wearable) before you can use it at the store... must support it at the store before it's worth supporting on the phone...
The second issue is fragmentation. Look at wireless charging. Two separate solutions. What works at McDonald's won't work at Starbucks (and vice versa). Although both support wireless charging, they support different models.
http://www.androidauthority.com/qi-a4wp-wireless-charging-st...
What use is a wireless payment service going to be if 90% of phones can't use it? When there is a competing standard?
>> "An Amex card is no harder to get than a MC/Visa."
Do Amex do a debit card? In Europe (certainly in the UK) debit cards are in much wider use than credit cards and Visa and Mastercard debit cards are given with almost every bank account.
They do a particularly weird instrument called a "charge card." It's not a debit card because it's not pulling straight from a checking account, but there's no long-term line of credit either. It's like a credit card that you're actually required to pay in full every month. So no different from responsible credit card use, but still not credit.
> They do a particularly weird instrument called a "charge card."
It should be noted that they also offer regular credit cards, in addition to the charge card, and these do not require payment in full at the end of the bill cycle.
The benefit of the charge card (Disclaimer: I have an Amex charge card) is that you can have an extremely large line of credit for those 21-30 days. It's less for balancing your finances and more for spend management (they have great tools to see where all of the money is going, very nice management for multiple family/corp cards, etc).
I'd still trade the charge card for their Costco version.
True, but AFAK with Amex there is no "lending institution." You get the card from American Express itself and it does not involve a relationship with a bank.
Yes, they do (it depends on the issuing bank, though.) I guess technically it's just a credit card with zero credit limit so you have to have some money in the account.
Percentage Fees charged for AmEx in Europe are 100-300% higher for small mom&pop stores, than for Visa/MC. Talked to my local bakery about it recently. They would be charged 5.5% of the bill if the customer used AmEx, but 2% if the customer used Visa.
The places where I can't use my American Express have been almost non-existent. One or two mom and pop restaurants were Visa only, but that is about it.
Almost all of my monthly spending is on my American Express.
Agreed, I make almost all my purchases with my Amex card (mostly because of unlimited 2% cash back on everything). It's usually smaller independent restaurants that don't take American Express. It's something that I never really understood, because American Express in my experience charges lower transaction fees than Visa/Mastercard. When I had an Amex merchant account they charged a flat $7/month fee with no per-transaction fees, though our volume wasn't very high.
However, you have to setup the American Express account separately, which probably has a lot to do with why many mom and pop type restaurants don't take it. But now that a lot of new restaurants seem to be using processors like Square, this is a complete non-issue.
That's not my experience. I have to use an Amex card for work to make IT purchases all the time and I'd say a good 25 to 30% of the places I try to use Amex at don't except it.
I am a normal consumer, I have never used American Express for business purposes. 25 - 30% seems really high though, considering American Express used to be targeted mainly towards business users...
You can walk into any Walmart and get a Bluebird prepaid American Express card for <$5 with almost all of the benefits of a checking account without the checks.
That's assuming the technology being developed is to store an existing credit card on your phone - isn't it more likely that Apple will try to make a play that involves your app store payment setup? Presumably, the implementation would be to expose your payment setup as a "virtual" Amex on your iPhone, but without making you a direct customer of Amex, but clearing the transaction through the Amex network.
True, although in the Netherlands this seems to be changing in the last few years. A lot of restaurants and stores for clothes/shoes etc are now accepting them. Grocery stores over here almost never accept credit cards.
If Apple sings some kind of exclusive deal for iPhone payments with the credit card companies I expect that half of Europe will start accepting credit cards because people willing to pay for a 600 euro phone are an interesting market segment.
I meant American Express. Acceptance of Mastercard and Visa is fine here, but American Express used to be far behind and is now playing catch-up.
And for groceries in Amsterdam for example you're going to be searching for quite some time for a supermarket that accepts credit cards. They only accept debit, which is what 99% of the population has as their primary card. Of course everybody has a credit card as well, but that's mostly used for online shopping and things like restaurants, not supermarkets.
So totally different from the US where any supermarket accepts credit-cards.
Discover is non-existing in at least northern Europe.
American Express is a bad choice for many parts of Europe because companies are use to very low processing fees, and AMEX (and Diners Club) are very expensive credit card to process.
Seems some people beg to differ. However AMEX costs more for the retailer, therefore, with everyone already with Visa/MC, why, as a retailer allow people to pay with AMEX? If you want to double your transaction costs, eat into your profit margin, have more admin for the book-keeper, then why not!!!
Part of the point of AMEX is that everyone is insured against scammers that bit more, hence the higher price/charges, however, in Europe where we have C+P nobody really wants AMEX - their business case just is not heard.
CC fraud in America, contrary to popular European belief, is not a problem for American consumers. American consumers are not liable for fraudulent charges made with their card; resolving them is a simple matter of telling your CC company that the charge was fraudulent (the majority of the time, the CC company has already figured that out themselves).
Chip and Pin buys American consumers fuck-all; it is merchants and CC companies that benefit.
European consumers seem to want American consumers to have chip and pin more than American consumers want it for themselves. It is truly bizarre. Are you guys getting a "refer your friends" commission or something?
There are countless USA tourists who go to Europe with their non-chip-and-pin cards and then wonder why it doesn't work. And that must suck for your holidays. So let's try to reduce that.
Chip and PIN has nothing to do with Amex's consumer-friendly chargeback policies. C+P tries to prevent fraudulent transactions, charebacks give consumers over misbehaving merchants.
