This product will be stillborn in the U.S. as NFC terminals are fairly rare and even after the education delivered by Google Wallet and ApplePay, 43% of people who attempt to use ApplePay at a terminal that supports it fail and the clerk provides no meaningful assistance.
If they won't support ApplePay, they won't support this.
So sure, it'll be stillborn in the US. But I don't give a crap about the US, you guys get enough of the cool stuff. This is a sweet deal for every other country with the infrastructure in place. This is a great idea for those countries, and definitely not a waste of effort in my eyes.
It is important to note that it does say World-wide. If they are poised to launch in other countries besides the US then I retract my statement about it being a waste.
However, I've seen much of this financial tech go straight to US for launch. If its NFC it's dead. Going that route, they may be out of business before they can even launch it elsewhere.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/tapping-away-at-checkout-with-a...
Edit: I missed that this product requires a smartphone. I thought it was a PayPass enabled card similar to Coinjar Swipe, that lets you spend Bitcoin in Australian stores: https://blog.coinjar.com/2015/02/26/now-every-australian-bus...
I believe it's a similar story in Canada.
The USA is finally moving to catch up with the rest of the world in terms of using smart cards rather than the archaic mag-stripe, as the liability shift that took place in Europe 10 years ago is swinging into force now.
But it might be too late, and you might be right, the likes of ApplePay may well take over entirely in the USA.
Elsewhere, where Apple have less market share this may not be true, and the US may end up in a ghetto of 1, again, with its own market dynamics and tech that's not applicable in the rest of the world.
Ah, this I didn't know, thanks.
>> Additionally if you support NFC, it isn't much more to support ICC as well.
It's different hardware. Historically the hardware has been more likely to support ICC/EMV and not NFC, but if the US is actually ever going to do a big EMV rollout then (were I the I the sort of person in charge of buying the equipment) it makes sense to go for both.
I'm sort-of interested in the Apple Pay thing now. (only sort-of, I find payments tech mostly to be incredibly boring). I've not worked on NFC/EMV contactless kernels but I understand that, unlike with the physical chip versions, you tend to need at least some amount of custom code for each card scheme. This has been put down to the schemes not pulling together quite so well this time around.
Meanwhile in Australia, over 70% of CC purchases at supermarkets (and 50% overall) under $100 are contactless, signatures have been phased out (PIN is required for transactions), and Chip & PIN cards have been the norm for 5+ years.
Do you have a source for this? I'm honestly interested in reading more about this and where this number comes from.