Chinese site Caixin reports that Apple has agreed to take much smaller fees from banks in China compared to the US as the company this month launches its Apple Pay payments service in the country.
The deal with Chinese banks will see Apple get around 0.07 percent per transaction, according to the report citing unnamed sources, compared to approximately 0.15 percent it’s charging banks in the US.
It appears that the expansion of Apple Pay into Australia could be farther off than some had hoped. According to a report today from The Sydney Morning Herald, Apple is in negotiations with at least four of the largest banks in Australia in order to form partnerships for Apple Pay in in the region. However, the report claims Apple is having issues in negotiations centered around the fees it collects from the currently supported Apple Pay markets of the United States and United Kingdom.
Research shared by Phoenix Marketing International offers new data for Apple Pay‘s adoption and performance since it launched in the United States in October last year. The survey polled just over 3,000 credit cardholders to conclude that “11% of all credit card-owning households” and two out of three iPhone 6 users have used Apple Pay. Aside from a high adoption rate for the mobile payment service, the survey also highlights that almost half of those Apple Pay users have used the service just one time.
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Smart password and security techniques are becoming increasingly important in our digital lives as new hacks seem to appear all the time, and having a unique and secure password (unlike these) helps ensure that your online identity is safe in the event of such a compromise.
LastPass, a cross platform secure digital vault app, is helping Mac users tackle the password management problem with the debut of its new Mac app. Previously only available for Mac as a browser extension and web portal, the new LastPass for Mac app brings new features to the desktop including quick search, security check, and more.
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A fix for a bug in Apple Pay that causes credit cards from Chase and others to not display the correct physical card design is being worked on, according to sources close to the situation.
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iPhone 6 and 6 Plus users will soon be able to use Siri to access credit cards stored in the Passbook app, if the beta version of iOS 8.1 is any indicator. We’ve already seen the Apple Pay privacy statement and other asssets pointing to this release being the one that enables the payment system next month, but now there’s even more proof.
Starting with version 8.1, if you ask Siri to show a credit card, the phone will bring up Passbook. Currently the app lacks the ability to add credit cards, but Apple has previously confirmed that this will be the application to manage Apple Pay cards. iOS 8.0 included an updated icon with a credit card glyph despite the fact that the functionality was not yet available.
Apple is currently developing iOS 8.2 and 8.3 alongside version 8.1.
Thanks for the tip, @Lakewoodr.
Asymco’s Horace Dediu points out with the graph above that Apple has been adding about a million new store accounts every couple of days. The numbers seem to be based on Tim Cook’s announcement at WWDC that Apple now has 575,000,000 million store accounts (which we assume includes all App Store, iTunes, and Apple Online Store accounts). That means most of them have credit cards on file and as Cook noted, that’s “more accounts with credit cards than any other store on the internet.”
