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from the a-win-for-the-little-guy....or-not dept.
Wal-Mart has launched its own smartphone app for processing payments, rather than adding support for systems being touted by the likes of Samsung, Apple, and Google (Wallet):
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. launched its own mobile payment system, dubbed Walmart Pay, in select stores near its Bentonville, Ark., headquarters on Thursday, giving customers their first opportunity to use a mobile payment system in its stores.
The retailing giant so far hasn't allowed other mobile payment platforms, including Samsung Pay or Apple Pay. Instead, it built its own system, which it said works with any iOS or Android device that can support the Walmart app and at any checkout lane, including self-service checkout.
Walmart Pay can handle major credit, debit, pre-paid and Walmart gift cards. The company is in discussions that could result in other mobile wallets being added to Walmart Pay, said Daniel Eckert, senior vice president of services for Walmart U.S.
Wal-Mart is part of a consortium called the Merchant Customer Exchange that includes Target Corp. and Best Buy Co. Inc. The MCX is working on an app called CurrentC that is still in the pilot phase in Columbus, Ohio. Members of the Merchant Customer Exchange pledged not to accept other mobile payment systems, according to The Wall Street Journal. That exclusivity was temporary and expired in August, a Walmart spokesperson said, freeing members to allow other mobile wallet transactions.
Wal-Mart plans to roll out Walmart Pay nationally after the first half of next year.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SrLnclt on Friday December 11 2015, @10:23PM
Maybe I'm living in a box... but what is the point of using these apps? I can either (a) pull my wallet out of my back pocket, grab my chipped credit card, swipe/insert my card, sign if needed, or (b) pull out my phone, enter my password, find an app, and do whatever I need to do to authorize/pay. I would think both of these would take me maybe 15-25 seconds to complete a transaction, so no real time savings. For security I prefer my chip/signature credit card to a smartphone app (wish we had pin/chip cards here in the states). For the companies is this just so more people can get a tiny cut of the money? And the only real reason people are actually using these payment options is OMG! Look at me! Apps on my phone!?!?
(Score: 2) by Valkor on Friday December 11 2015, @11:13PM
I look forward to being able to go out and only carry my phone. Not carrying a wallet is one less thing to worry about. Also if someone steals my phone they will NOT be able to use it to pay for stuff, whereas cards (even chipped ones) can be cloned/MITM'd or outright accepted no questions asked by an unwitting clerk. With my phone, two different PINs are required to make a payment, neither of which a thief is likely to guess.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Friday December 11 2015, @11:18PM
Nail on head.
I'm in Canada so NFC cards are becoming pretty common. I can pull my card out, tap a terminal, and paid in under 5 seconds. For larger transactions, chip & pin. Pulling out my phone, entering a password, finding the appropriate app, entering in another password??... is NOT faster or more convenient. Not only is it slower, but my phones batteries are occasionally dead; which is not something I look for in a payment method. Plus to make it worse I usually have NFC turned off to save battery; and for security... so more steps.
I just have no use for this at all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 11 2015, @11:37PM
I find the iPhone version both faster and easier than using my card.
I carry my phone in my shirt pocket, so it's easier to reach and pull out than my wallet. With the phone, I don't have to find an pull out the appropriate card. All I have to do is touch the phone to the card reader while touching the fingerprint reader. It's considerably faster than a chip card; about 1 second vs 5-10 seconds. It doesn't use my actual account information, so there is no way my account information being stolen (although I believe the chip card has the same advantage). In the U.S, at least, they aren't using Chip & PIN, so if someone steals your card, they can make purchases with it. With the iPhone, that's effectively impossible.
The only problem is that so few merchants actually support non-contact card readers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @12:10AM
> For the companies is this just so more people can get a tiny cut of the money?
It is the other way around. They hope to get to the point where the visa/mastercard payment processing networks (and their fees) are out of the loop.
But they are too greedy, they just want to do a "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" rather than fundamentally change the market. Thus they aren't adding much practical value to either payers or merchants and will fail unless mastercard or visa do something so deeply stupid that they lose their massively dominate positions.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RedBear on Saturday December 12 2015, @09:20AM
Well, I can only speak for Apple Pay, but when I use it to pay at McD's or wherever it works so far it's much faster and simpler than what you've described. I just wave my (locked) iPhone at the NFC reader, the Wallet (used to be Passbook) app pops up (right on the lock screen, you don't need to unlock the device) and then you confirm payment with "Touch ID" (Apple's name for their home-button integrated fingerprint scanner).
The whole process takes just a couple of seconds. No, literally. It works exactly as presented in Apple's keynote when they introduced it. If you don't have the right card selected as the default in Wallet it might take another couple of seconds to shuffle the cards, about as long as it would take you to find and pull out the correct card from your actual wallet. In my experience when Apple Pay has worked it has been a vastly superior experience to trying to swipe a card, or scan a chipped card, and wait for the cashier and then the signature screen. The chip process takes so long it's ridiculous. By the time you pull out your wallet I'm already done with my Apple Pay payment.
Then there's the security features, the tokenization of the data so that each transaction is unique and can't be reused, and the fact that the retailer doesn't get any of the data, just the confirmation of payment. AFAIK, these go beyond the level of security that is implemented in current NFC payment systems. A signature on a screen certainly isn't secure in any way. That's just to cover the retailer's ass, it does nothing to prevent misuse of your card or protect your payment information.
So, I can't speak for the other digital payment systems that are trying to compete with Apple Pay, but as far as Apple Pay is concerned I believe there is much more of a point to using it than just "OMG! Look at me! Apps on my phone!?!?". Apple Pay can also be used by any iOS app as a secure way to accept payment from the user, and again the app developer would not receive any of your payment data, like your credit card information or bank account number. So all the retailers and app developers who are receiving payments from you through Apple Pay can't get hacked and lose your credit card info, because they never have possession of it. If you had a credit card that you never used for anything but Apple Pay the only people who would know your card number would be you and the card issuer. I don't know about you but I'm getting kind of tired of getting a new card every time some odd charge shows up after my number gets stolen from some random retailer getting hacked, so I like the idea of what Apple Pay does behind the scenes.
But without Touch ID, the quick and accurate fingerprint reader built into Apple's recent iOS devices, yeah, it might be more of an inconvenience. I can't imagine using something that required me to unlock my phone with a password and then waste time finding a specific app to make a payment at a specific retailer. That would be a pain. But that does not describe the experience of using Apple Pay, or using Apple's Wallet (nee Passbook) app for airline boarding passes and whatnot. It's a remarkably painless process once you get the hang of it. At the airport my boarding pass automatically shows up on the lock screen without me doing anything. Just swipe to the right and bam, it pops up. No unlocking the phone, no fumbling about looking for a certain app, no waste of time. It works much better than you imagine.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ