TECHNOLOGY - Apple Pay and Others

Ya...  Sure...  With all the hacking of smartphones, banking sites, stores, and more lets, add another easy way to steal your money.  If you use these apps, you better not loose your phone.

"Will Apple Pay phase out the wallet?" PBS NewsHour 10/20/2014

Excerpt

GWEN IFILL (NewsHour):  If you happen to be one of the millions who bought a new Apple iPhone in recent weeks, or you are waiting for your upgrade to arrive, you may feel like your wallet is getting a little lighter, and not just because of the price of the phone.

In an era of electronic payments, technology is turning the wallet in your pocket digital.

Hari Sreenivasan has our conversation, recorded in our New York studios.

HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour):  Paying for something with your phone isn’t necessarily a new idea.  I have been using mine to pay for cabs for the past year.  But, today, Apple launches its mobile payment platform called Apple Pay.

And here to help us understand how the arrival of Apple into this arena changes the game is Arik Hesseldahl, a senior editor at technology news site Re/code.

So, why is it a big deal that Apple decides to do something that Google has been doing for a while?

ARIK HESSELDAHL, Re/code:  Well, partially because, with the Google experience, it has been inconsistent.  There has been a lot of resistance from the carriers.

For instance, Verizon has its own payment plans and has resisted Google’s infrastructure, Google’s plan.  And so it has been an inconsistent and an uneven experience on the Google platform.  With apple, we have a completely unified experience.

Apple has also — it’s been a lumbering giant in payments for a long time.  There are more credit card accounts associated in the iTunes infrastructure than on Amazon or PayPal.  And so it has only been a matter of time for the technology to come and the experience to show up and make it easy for consumers to use.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  So besides Apple and Google, you also hear Wal-Mart and PayPal.  All these people are getting into this arena.  Why is it so important for them to control the actual transaction?  What do they get out of it?

ARIK HESSELDAHL:  There’s a lot of money.

They are multibillion-dollar businesses.  First Data is one and there are numerous other payment processors build multibillion-dollar business on essentially pennies and fractions of pennies.  There is always money to be made on the swipe of a card or in this case now the wave of a phone.