AUSTIN, Texas — CU Water Cooler Co-founder and Currency Marketing President/Creative Director Tim McAlpine and panelists Aite Group Senior Analyst Ron Shevlin and American Airlines Federal Credit Union Vice President, Payments/Digital Strategies Christopher Danvers sorted through the hype vs. reality surrounding Apple Pay at the CU Water Cooler Symposium.
"My initial take was it's finally hit the point of acceptance about what's going to happen, questions about how fast adoption would be," Shevlin said. "It cleared the air around NFC as an accepted form of technology for payments and the mechanism of storing numbers, the secure element in phones, as an accepted form of mobile payment."
Danvers added that Apple Pay set the payment standard for the industry.
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"Apple's approach has been more collaborative and respecting the payments experts. Saying 'hey, we're not a card network and realize there's a pain point here,'" Danvers said. "In online purchases, that card data is tokenized. If captured, it's worthless to resell. That tokenization piece huge and may represent a value proposition for issuers that might be worth paying the additional fee to Apple. "
So what does it all mean? It depends, the panelists said. Apple has set the stage and now its up to consumers to dictate how they will make payments.
"The wallet is not the value, but the card features and options. If you're not offering a card members want to use, it doesn't matter. For credit unions it's about driving the card choice, not the transaction mechanism," Shevlin said. "It's an opportunity to up your game in the credit card space around rewards and cards members want to use.
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