Apple posted an ‘update’ on their news page, Apple celebrates 10 years of Apple Pay, where Jennifer Bailey promotes Apple Pay accomplishments, plugs new iOS 18 Apple Pay features (pay in installments, pay with points) and reveals a little bit of roadmap that is mostly Apple Wallet rather than Apple Pay. Things like more Digital Car Keys and Digital ID. The PR blitz included a video conference Jennifer Bailey ‘interview’ with Frank McShan, and a post on The Points Guy site that has some interesting quotes (no full unedited interview transcripts in the interest of transparency of course, though it’s fun to imagine Jennifer Bailey’s expression if asked about the resounding failure of NFC flavored App Clips).
The take aways?
The Apple Pay 10 year journey in the US was all about “getting merchants to upgrade their payment technology in their stores to be able to accept Apple Pay,” that now stands at “over 90% ” because “customers love the simplicity.” Bailey also goes out of her way to mention the combination of hardware and software, the secure element in combination with biometric authentication and tokenization that makes Apple Pay payments “so much more secure” than plastic card payments or non-Apple Pay online payments resulting in “much less fraud.”
Pretty much boilerplate but note the emphasis on hardware: secure element, secure enclave…i.e. no internet dependent EU dictated Host Card Emulation (HCE) here.
Apple Wallet will continue to add more digital car keys but the next big long-term push is digital ID, specifically a repeat of the 10 year Apple Pay ‘tap to pay’ merchant acceptance challenge with ‘tap to ID’. Currently TSA is the only scenario where people can use Apple Wallet tap to ID, extremely limited. We’ve had ‘Share your license or ID in an app’ for in-app ID verification since iOS 16 and iOS 17 saw the rollout of Tap to Present ID on iPhone but it will be years for tap to ID acceptance infrastructure and service side to come together. Japan will become the first country outside of the USA to offer a government ID in Apple Wallet in the spring of 2025.
This PR blitz timing is interesting not just for the look at how 10 years of Apple Pay ‘changed the industry’, which it did, but also that it’s coming 2 weeks before the release of iOS 18.1 Apple NFC & Secure Element Platform aka ‘open NFC’, although the actual meaning of ‘open’ is pretty limited when you read the fine print. In short, 10 years of Apple Pay PR is part celebration and part marketing to promote doing all things NFC with the simplicity of Apple Pay /Wallet for the biggest return. And in the next 10 years of Apple Pay-Wallet-Apple NFC & Secure Element Platform, the iPhone secure element is going to get a lot more crowded.
iOS 17 laid the foundation for open NFC by limiting iPhone support to power reserve secure element iPhone models (iPhone XS and later) that process NFC transactions independently of iOS. Users discovered the iOS 17 Wallet card limit was much higher, only limited by secure element memory. In iOS 18 however, there are indications this may have changed. The secure element can be ‘full’ even though there is plenty of free space showing. A bug? A feature? What it means we can only guess but it will be interesting to watch how things unfold with the iOS 18.1 release.
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