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Comment by rnernento | Hacker News Reader

I think I'm missing something on this, but how is it possible Apple isn't storing credit card information on the device or their servers? How are they connecting the payments you make with Apple pay back to the credit card you choose to use.

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This is done via credit card tokenization. Tokenization is a major boom to the payment industry. However, there is a lot of complexity and moving pieces for all of this to work. But once it works, it'll unlock a lot of potential for startups to innovate in the payment industry.

http://www.emvco.com/specifications.aspx?id=263

Curious to hear what innovations you see coming down the pipeline? The spec also discusses loyalty programs via tokenization, but no one has yet to implement them to my knowledge.

PCI compliance is a high bar that has limited a lot of innovation in real world transactions. Merchants are still using POS and payment terminals that are a decade old. Merchants have been quite reluctant to change this as it has been expensive and does not add value to them to upgrade.

Due to EMV liability shift, tokenization, windows xp deprecation (as well as a number of other changes in the payment industry), merchants now have the catalyst to look at other solutions. This has opened the door for everything from POS to payment terminals to hand held registers. By lowering the bar of PCI compliance and risk, it opens up the sector to other devices and applications that do not need to meet the bars of payment compliance.

See here: http://clover-developers.blogspot.com/2014/09/apple-pay.html

Why this site is asking me for some sort of certificate access? And once you select whatever certificate, another Safari process nags for access.

Hate it when articles don't define their acronyms.

PAN = primary account number.

EMV = Europay, MasterCard, Visa. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMV

Given the target audience of that blog, those seem to be perfectly reasonable things to leave out. I mean, do you expect programming blogs to define 'API'?

I assume once they register your credit card number with the card provider, they have no longer any use for it. The connection between your card number and your apple id can be stored on the card provider side.

I'm guessing they have established relationships with the card issuer and will use your card number only once to establish the link, after which the card info isn't needed.

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