Applepay is designed to introduce a technological jump.
USA is faced to upgrade their CC system and improve the security.
This means, as far as im not in USA and if i remember correctly, that USA is facing a big challenge because law has passed to force the security improvment.
No more magnetic track card, the future is the chip card, says the law.
But the chip card, is not US technology, and major builder of POS in america are pretty retarded to deal with chip card technology.
A lot of foreign patents also exist into the chip card industry and none of them belongs to USA.
So is it a good idea to continue with CC industry as far as 99% of player are from Europe where chip card are standard (and in France most advanced use in term of security) ?
So the applepay initiative is the answer of US industry to this challenge: it simply says "we dont need CC anymore"
And from my perspective they are right.
The future is in mobile payment application.
And the main point also which is in this deal, is that bank will promote apple technology: apple endorses the cost of fraud. This is the biggest point of the deal.
Also in the backoffice of payment industry, its a major change.
Usually all known protocal are basically ASN1 derived or inspired and modern are Binary TLV.
SEPA which is the future standard of payement in europe is already DEAD XML is so 90.
The future in term of cost, deployment, scalability, is just JSON RPC, all mobile device embedding a webkit which manage http connection.
And the funny part is that its the final customer who will bear the cost of possessing the device.
