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Comment by taurath | Hacker News Reader

5% at the moment seems like an incredibly high number to me, at least in the US. I looked it up here, where the stats say a different number: https://www.pymnts.com/apple-pay-adoption/

Also latest is about 51% of merchants have compatible equipment.

1.1% of sales is apple pay. Also usage numbers have gone down from 2018 to 2019. Seems like a puff piece to me?

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They’re claiming 5% of global card transactions, that surely can’t be true, there are quite a few developed countries where iPhones are not that common, and countries where other contactless payment systems are already widespread. And what about middle income and poor countries?

I think it might be true on the grounds that credit cards are only king in the US and Latin America, whereas they represent less than 10% of cashless payments in the large markets, namely Asia.

Developed countries have more accessible and cheaper systems, like M-Pesa. In China, you generally just scan a QR code to make a payment. Neither of these systems piggyback on the expensive and slow credit card system.

So, I think this statistic might be as true as it is misleading. Impressive marketshare, just not as big a market.

In Australia I would say that about 90% of card transactions are contactless and of them a good 30% use some type of phone payment. Isn't even blinked at any more.

Is debit payment a big thing in Australia? For smaller payment amounts I see debit cards way more frequently than CC or mobile.

Debit payments are around 3x as popular as credit payments here and there is, last I heard, a 50-50 split between using cards and phones to make them. There's an interesting demographic association to it as well, credit is much much more popular with older people (50+). Every few months you see a "millennials are killing the credit card industry" fuss.

The U.S. is notoriously behind on this sort of stuff

"The U.S. is notoriously behind on this sort of stuff"

Which is to say, after inventing the credit card, the US has since fallen behind.

Too busy inventing The Internet I suppose ...

> Which is to say, after inventing the credit card, the US has since fallen behind.

Yes, it has indeed.

The US was way ahead on credit cards to begin with, and was then leapfrogged by countries building payment infrastructure with newer technology. There’s no reason the US couldn’t re-leapfrog with its next generation.

I have no idea if 5% is correct, but worth noting that 1.1% figure is total sales, not including online. The article is about total credit card transaction volume.

Given the currently staggering inequality of wealth distribution on Earth, I would wager that the average revenue of Apple customers (arguably at least half the richest, trickling down to upper classes) is more than enough to make said customers' spending several times that of the average credit card owner (also increased purchase frequency).

That's what the story of Apple's market shares and image around the world seems to paint, anyway (the US is really an outlier, no other country buys anywhere near as many iPhones except Sweden, Japan and Switzerland iirc).

Apple is successfully pivoting into a luxury brand + service provider (let's call it the Porsche or Vuitton of consumer devices), and I think this article / thread goes to show that they've now effectively conquered their customers' wallet — as in, the product category.

Well played, hats off, but the genius really was in developing the strategy itself: suppose you have $200bn sitting in cash offshore that you can't bring back easily, and you also happen to have the 10-20% richest people on Earth as customers. Well, what can you do with those? ... Offer a financial service maybe, like payments? Tim Cook: hold my pad

I really do think the 5% figure might be every bit as real as the price tag of the latest flagships, as real as the kind of global wealth that allows casually spending ~4 figures on a phone in 2020.

There are nearly one billion iPhones in use in the world today [0]. That's far from a Porsche or Vuitton level exclusive, it's more like Ford.

And since the US corporate tax rate was cut back to normal global levels, they've been repatriating the extra overseas cash [1] and mostly using it to fund buybacks and dividends.

[0]: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2019/01/30/900-million-iphones...

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-17/apple-exp...

5% growing to 10% just sounded crazy to me. For this to be true every iPhone user has to be making a butt-load of purchases and always using Apple Pay. I haven't seen any numbers that would back up this level of adoption.

They don't have to be large purchases, just everyday routine stuff. For instance, going to work, somebody might get a bus and a train. That's two transactions per trip, four transactions per day, 20 transactions per week. 25 if they grab a coffee on the way to work. 30 if they buy lunch. You're looking at ~1,500 transactions per year just for one person with this routine, even if they don't use Apple Pay for anything else. There are about a billion active iPhones out there, it doesn't take a large proportion to start using Apple Pay more to account for a huge number of transactions.

As soon as a city rolls out NFC support for public transport, that's going to be an instant boost of millions of transactions per year, because anybody with a smartphone or smartwatch doesn't have to bother with the hassle of buying tickets or topping up a transit card any more, they just have to wave their watch at the reader. Compare a transit card, where people typically top it up for weeks at a time with a single cash or credit card transaction, to Apple Pay, where there's at least one transaction every single day you travel.

I'm used to living in places where NFC support in public transport is ubiquitous, and when I visited San Francisco recently, it felt like I was living in a time warp having to mess around with a Clipper card. BART has ~125 million trips per year. How many transactions per year do you think Apple Pay will be boosted by when BART finally supports it? And that's just one single location for one use case.

The drop from 2018 to 2019 might be due to Visa and other rolling out contact-less cards. I haven't used apple pay since I received new cards

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