Thread

Banks and Credit Unions to Team Up Against Apple Pay Fees

127 points · 133 comments · Brajeshwar

havaloc · 1790442549 · focus · HN ↗
I get why the banks are not happy, but I can tell them that I am not going to use Chase Wallet, Bank of America Wallet, Citi Wallet...just pay the fee and be thankful for the reduced payment friction, which they invariably make money from. PS: Nobody is going to use Paze (yet another half baked wallet), other than to collect the free $10 to sign up for it.
Somewhat related, even Walmart relented and now supports Apple Pay/Contactless. Every big merchant has now relented (Kroger, Home Depot, Walmart).
1. syvolt · 1790444937 · focus · HN ↗
  Or Apple Pay can just be like Google Wallet is on Android? The alternative is not multiple apps.
  1. add-sub-mul-div · 1790448179 · focus · HN ↗
    Another alternative (in the US, at least) is tapping a piece of plastic instead of your phone and not inviting any of the tech giants into your transactions at all. What an unforced error, to shovel more of your data at them needlessly.
    jasode · 1790450329 · focus · HN ↗
    > is tapping a piece of plastic instead of your phone and not inviting any of the tech giants into your transactions at all.
    Apple doesn't see individual transactions when Apple Pay is used at retail stores' tap-to-pay terminals. The secret card payment token is sent from the phone to the credit-card's issuing bank and bypasses Apple servers. In this way, using Apple Pay is more secure and private than plastic cards because the real card number details remains hidden from the merchant.
    The iPhone does contact Apple servers to add a new card to the digital wallet. Apple servers then contacts the issuing bank to get the secret token the bank generates and then puts it in the digital wallet. Conceivably, the "add a new card to digital wallet" could also have been done without Apple in the middle but it would require a much more convoluted, less secure, and more user-hostile workflow to do it. (e.g. the end user would have to know what bank endpoint to contact, manually enter the long and cryptic digits of the secret token, or maybe scan a QR code on a computer screen that's vulnerable to interception and phishing.)
    bdangubic · 1790450444 · focus · HN ↗
    don’t be silly, apple displays me exact amount on the screen, in plain fucking text, after each transaction - that’s crazy you wrote this
    tekla · 1790450788 · focus · HN ↗
    Man, its amazing how confident you are about this, considering I know individual people who independently work at Visa, Mastercard, AND Apple, who have worked on mobile payments who independently confirm that none of them know any personal info and that its all pass-through.
    So, are you sure you know what you are talking about?
    ssl-3 · 1790453321 · focus · HN ↗
    This kind of appeal to authority [believe me because I say so!] doesn't really add much information, does it?
    The report, above, is that previous transactions are visible within Apple's payment app. Apple agrees[1]. I'm willing to accept that this observation is based on reality and that it is reported in good faith.
    Meanwhile, the suggestion is that Apple has no knowledge of transaction history.
    Is there a way in which these two seemingly-conflicting concepts can be constructively combined into an understandable whole?
    [1]: <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-us/104954" rel="nofollow">https://support.apple.com/en-us/104954
    (For my part, I've never used Apple Pay and it's possible that I never will. I do not have a dog in this race.)
    epistasis · 1790454088 · focus · HN ↗
    This is baffling, there's all sorts of information on my phone that Apple has zero knowledge of, why would the transactions be different?
    Do you think Apple has complete copies of everything? I don't understand where this supposed contradiction is supposed to exist, unless you think that Apple has complete knowledge of all phone contents, which would require complete ignorance of the entire platform.
    ssl-3 · 1790455787 · focus · HN ↗
    > This is baffling, there's all sorts of information on my phone that Apple has zero knowledge of, why would the transactions be different?
    It's kind of unique. It involves finances, and reporting transactions, and it involves their app with their branding that runs on hardware that they unilaterally control. They apparently even take cut from the middle of each of these transaction.
    If Apple does all of this with zero knowledge, then I am willing to accept accept that...
    > Do you think Apple has complete copies of everything? I don't understand where this supposed contradiction is supposed to exist, unless you think that Apple has complete knowledge of all phone contents, which would require complete ignorance of the entire platform.
    ...but I'll only accept it if the functional operation can be explained.
    This kind of non-explanatory browbeating doesn't further my understanding of anything at all. I have never endeavored to undertake a faith-based approach to understanding technology, and I'm certainly not going to begin doing so today.
    bdangubic · 1790462548 · focus · HN ↗
    people will people :-)
    deltaknight · 1790452580 · focus · HN ↗
    This information comes from the card issuer directly, after the transaction has completed. It usually requires the mobile banking app to be installed.
    The wallet app has a way to get the information, but it’s not from the tap itself. The tap interaction is not able to provide this information back to the phone (because the transaction auth happens long after the tap interaction completes).
    Taps are designed to work with fully offline devices (which is why you can tap a plastic card, it is powered by the card terminal for the duration of the tap only, and requires no online interaction)
    bdangubic · 1790462751 · focus · HN ↗
    > This information comes from the card issuer directly, after the transaction has completed. It usually requires the mobile banking app to be installed.
    except of course it fucking doesn’t, I don’t have Chase or Amex apps on my phone… and yet my transactions are on my phone and watch and in a list inside my “wallet” and probably in the phone settings somewhere as well :)
    [deleted] · 1790465904 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]

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