litaph91

You can view their list of apis here https://developer.mastercard.com/portal/display/api/API but they do require you to go through some exercises before you can get to some of them. With the PayPass program i'm not sure on the specifics but I would assume a fairly strenuous look at your business and what you intend to do.

Edit: Close from memory but it was 42% couldn't get help from a clerk, 47% were denied by a participating merchant and the source article is here: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2015/04/like-all-mobile-wallets...

The issue really is that bitcoin isn't suited for retail transactions.

I work in the payments industry and we took a long hard look at integrating bitcoin payments into our point-of-sale and determined that it was effort we would get no reward for.

Merchants wont use it. They love no chargebacks and no real fees, but we can't guarantee they will ever get the money for the sandwich they just sold.

Working with risk levels and calculations around zero confirmation transactions work but they still pose an element of risk that isn't necessarily present with cash and credit.

On the processing side, we're scared to death by anti-retail thinking and things like replace-by-fee which, in our opinion, would outright kill off retail transactions using bitcoin. There's just way too much uncertainty that someone will decide a patch like that is needed and start deploying it even if it isn't in the core.

It's the upside and downside of decentralized systems really.

I will admit that while scanning through the content on the site again, I missed an important piece of wording that initially formulated half of my opinion here.

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.

I sincerely wonder why companies are wasting their effort on the contactless market, especially smaller companies.

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.