Apple Brings Apple Pay To The United Kingdom
by Brandon Chester on June 8, 2015 1:45 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Apple Watch
- Apple Pay
Today Apple announced that their Apple Pay service is coming to the United Kingdom in July. Apple Pay was launched in October of 2014, and was originally available only with credit and debit cards issued by banks in the United States. Bringing the service to the UK marks the first expansion of Apple Pay to another country.
According to Apple, Apple Pay is launching with 8 major banks in the UK, and 70% of existing debit and credit cards will support it at launch. There will be over 250,000 locations in the UK that will support Apple Pay, with more to come in the future. A notable supporter will be the London Transportation System, with users being able to pay for transit fares using their phone.
In addition to Apple Pay's expansion outside the United States, Apple also announced some improvements to the service that will be rolling out along with iOS 9. The Passbook app is being renamed to Wallet, and Apple is adding support for loyalty cards from retailers.
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warmonger - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
Any idea if we can use Apple Pay with a US credit card to pay in the UK? This would conveniently solve the chip-and-pin problem with US cards for me.Brandon Chester - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
You've always been able to use your US credit card on Apple Pay to make purchases in other countries.Daniel Egger - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
Wow, that's an additional reach of a whopping 8% of all Europeans. Why not use the republic of Guinea if they need guinea pigs?mopatops - Monday, June 8, 2015 - link
Anyone able to help me understand how this will work on the London Underground? The TfL readers require you to tap in and out of the network when you enter or exit a station, calculating the fare based on your route. I thought tokenization equaled anonymity, yet TfL must have the capability to track the same card across multiple taps.iwod - Wednesday, June 10, 2015 - link
I have no idea, my memory with UK TfL were they are still based on Oyster Card. And if that is true then this will be big as many part of the world are based on the same / similar Stored Value Card instead of using Master / Vista NFC.hanssonrickard - Wednesday, June 10, 2015 - link
Maybe it is only used to "load" the Oyster card with more money? You might still need the Oyster card for the actual entrance and ride.edzieba - Tuesday, June 9, 2015 - link
It would be nice if Google Wallet / Google Pay / Whatever It's Called Now were officially activated outside of the US. Functionally, it's been working fine for years on any NFC reader (if you do the proxy dance to get it activated and have a source of US funding to top it up), so there's no technical barrier to it.hanssonrickard - Wednesday, June 10, 2015 - link
Nothing more than an NFC reader, which is not present everywhere.