Apple is about to open the NFC chip of the iPhone so that any application can access it. The pressure and the laws of the European Union are once again making decisions. That seems like a very bad idea to me. This may not be the most popular opinion, but I have good reasons for that. The main thing is usability.
I love Apple Pay, I use it all the time for almost all payments in physical stores and for all those that allow it on the web. It’s easy, it’s convenient, it’s secure, and it makes paying for any item as simple as holding your Apple Watch near the payment terminal. And so worry. Open NFC can change all that
Competition is good, but in some cases it leaves collateral damage
The main idea before an open NFC is that the banks and entities wish to position their own payment solutions. Not just offering, but encouraging usage in a very clear way, going so far as to stop offering Apple Pay support. When the service first arrived in USA, you will remember that not all banks allowed their cards to be used with Apple Pay.
Those of us from another entity had to wait almost a year to enjoy a service that many of us now take for granted. On the other side of the world, in Australia, the situation was much worse, since Australia’s big banks unite against Apple Payso the service took even longer to roll out.
At one point, some banks adopted the service and gradually others gave in, but now, if NFC is open to everyone, the situation could be reversed. Apple charges a small fee to banks for using Apple Pay, while making sure not to collect any transaction data. Between expenses and less access to data on our habits
Yes, I admit it, we are faced with a hypothesis. We may be putting ourselves in the worst case scenario, but given what happened with the arrival of the service, that doesn’t seem unreasonable to me either. What would we gain with open NFC in terms of payments? Store our credit cards in another app — call it PayPal or something similar — to get the same service?
The integration that Apple Pay has in our devices, being its immediate activation by double tap and by Face ID, does not seem to be within reach of third-party applications. Honestly, I worry about a future where bank X withdraws its support for Apple Pay and whose customers must go to the bank’s app
While competition always improves services, in some cases services that are dedicated to federating the offers of different companies, such as Apple Pay, which centralizes mobile payments for all financial institutions, need sufficient autonomy to be able to carry out their work. An advantage or in this case the absence of alternatives to avoid that, for the benefit of competition, each bank offers its own method of payment.
It may be too early to get our hands dirty, I admit it, but personally I am closely following the evolution of this small NFC chip in our iPhones and the regulations concerning all this. We will see how events unfold..
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