CEO Perspective: Apple Pay Is a Great Development for the Payments Industry

Jason Oxman
September 10, 2014 – Apple announced its entry into the mobile payments market today, and both the payments and technology world are abuzz.  From my vantage point, Apple’s entry is the natural next step in an industry that has evolved over the past two years to embrace innovation and competition.  I think it is important to emphasize this simple fact:  Apple Pay is a great development for the payments industry.

Apple has a long history of promoting consumer acceptance of new technology.  But the way in which they enter new markets is interesting.  For example, Apple didn’t invent the MP3 player, the smartphone, the online music store, or the tablet — in fact, Apple came to those product segments years after they were developed.  But Apple just does things better – from design to functionality to marketing, Apple’s entry causes product segments to take off.

So too with mobile payments.  NFC has been around for a decade, and mobile wallets have been in the market for years.  So it’s true that Apple didn’t announce anything new today.  But Apple Pay promises to inspire millions of consumers to load their credit and debit cards onto their iOS devices and tap to pay at their favorite merchants.  Apple’s partnership with so many ETA member companies – First Data and TSYS on tokenization, Visa, MasterCard and Amex on payments rails connectivity, to name a few — means great things for the ongoing collaboration between payments and technology companies that ETA exists to facilitate.

I’m proud that ETA has worked hard for the past two years to bring payments and technology companies together to do business.  ETA’s Mobile Payments Committee, first formed in 2012, is the hub of industry activity in driving merchant and consumer adoption of mobile payments.  What’s most exciting about Apple Pay is that merchants will have more reason to deploy mobile payments acceptance capabilities at the point of sale – great for all payments companies — while consumers will have more reasons to eschew cash and checks in favor of paying electronically – great for all payments companies.

So Apple — welcome to the payments industry.  We’re glad you’re here.

[spacer height=3] [divide] [spacer height=3] Jason Oxman is the CEO of the Electronic Transactions Association.