The much expected launch of the service is nearly here as there is only one day remaining until Apple Pay is released in China. What that means is that points of sale supported by several banks in China will start working via near field communication contact too, enabling individuals to pay with their iPhones only, after they’ve loaded their cards’ information in their smartphones.
This movement is the mere attempt of Apple to make NFC payments a more popular method than paying with cash or swiping your card. Considering that its release of Apple Pay in the United States nearly a year and a half ago was rewarded with only mild success, but far from the amount of adoption that the company was expecting, it would seem that the tech giant is now preferring to look towards a country such as China.
The reason is the fact that China is officially the second biggest market for Apple and its services were also approved and supported by the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. This is the factor that may make the difference when it comes to China – part of the reason Apple Pay was not as successful when it tried expanding its services into United Kingdom and Australia was the major banks’ reticence towards the service. They took a while to start accepting the Apple Pay system and support it in stores, so the service too had a slow evolution.
However, while Apple is receiving a huge amount of support for their payment service in China doesn’t make it easy for the company to breakthrough and establish themselves as a wildly popular alternative. They are currently up against 2 other already very popular payment systems: Tencent’s WeChat Payment and Alipay. It’s not known whether Apple Pay’s ‘attraction points’ have what it takes to steer public away from already well established services to themselves.
There are currently 19 Chinese banks that will support Apple Pay on launch in total, counting ICBC, China Construction Bank and China Guangfa Bank in their midst.
There are currently over 358 million Chinese individuals who make use of online mobile payments in China alone and Apple hopes to gain at least a portion of the market by allowing payment via iPhones, iPads and even Apple Watches. However, the company is not only treading in unknown waters, but also waters that their direct competitors have a lot more knowledge and experience in.
Samsung is planning to brings its own version of the payment service, Samsung Pay, to China later this year as well.
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