Cuscal is excited about the announcement from Apple today that it will support payments in its new iPhone 6, together with iOS8 and has called it Apple Pay.
Adrian Lovney, General Manager, Products and Services believes that Cuscal is in a prime position for early adoption to the new Apple Pay solution.
“With Cuscal’s work to date regarding tokenisation we can leverage the ongoing development of our HCE app, previously only available for Android devices,” said Adrian.
“This ensures that we are in a key industry position for early adoption to the new Apple Pay solution. As you might expect, Apple’s announcement positions themselves as the gatekeeper to the Apple ecosystem (unlike the Android HCE approach which is more open).”
Apple has announced that as part of iPhone 6 they will be launching their NFC enabled mobile payments service (Apple Pay) in partnership with the key schemes, specifically Mastercard, Visa and Amex as well as initially the top six issuers in the USA, covering 83% of cardholders. This includes tokenisation through the schemes and a secure element embedded in the phone itself. Substantial hardware upgrades of existing iPhones to the iPhone 6 will be required before Apple Pay is widespread, however with the launch of Apple Watch also incorporating NFC capabilities in 2015 we understand that this will bring NFC capability to the current iPhone 5 and iPhone 5c.
The device will have preloaded applets for each of the schemes, which Apple will provision secure credentials directly into the embedded element from iTunes or add new by taking a photo from the iSight camera.
Adrian continued that “While Apple has clearly indicated their intent to launch this in the USA in the first instance we anticipate that Australia will be a focus as a fast follower to this initial roll-out. As Australia has one of the highest rates of contactless availability Cuscal is excited to welcome the new Apple capability and provide our clients with a quick-to-market solution ready for the Australian Apple launch.”
“When we can we will incorporate this functionality within Cuscal’s payment platform, as well as within Cuscal’s mobile banking and payment suite.
“As a major Australian issuer we intend to be on the frontline of this exciting new development by Apple, allowing our clients to continue to be at the forefront of mobile payments.
“We believe that a combination of Apple’s NFC based solution and Cuscal’s HCE offering will finally bring an end to the Secure Element (SE) wars and allow consumers to access NFC payments on the device of their choice at an affordable price point,” he concluded.
