A new report claims that an Apple mobile payment service is being developed. The Wall Street Journal reported that Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice-president for Internet software and services, met up with “industry executives” about the possibility of establishing Apple’s role in handling payments for goods and services.
The newspaper also points out Jennifer Bailey’s promotion from her role in running Apple’s online store to a new position that deals with building a payment business.
The mobile payment service is currently a vibrant category, with the likes of Square and PayPal working on making payments easiers easier with the use of smartphones.
The possibility of an Apple mobile payment service would make sense for the company, as it earns billions of dollars from selling music, movies, apps, and books through iTunes. The company currently has its own mobile payments scheme inside Apple retail stores, wherein customers can scan and pay for physical items on display using their iPhones.
There is also the Passbook, which was introduced with iOS 6, wherein users can store event tickets, coupons, and loyalty cards on their iPhones.
But what Apple may likely to avoid is to build NFC (near-field communication) technology into its phones, mainly because of the lack of NFC-compatible point-of-sale systems in the United States.
Source: Mashable
