As usual, the ever growing number of inbound visitors to Japan are scratching heads at store checkout terminals asking to ‘pay with Apple Pay’ which doesn’t mean anything in the Japanese mobile payments jungle. So lots of westerners repeatedly ask, why can’t I just pay with Apple Pay? You can of course but the context and meaning is completely different.
Jennifer Bailey addressed the ‘pay with Apple Pay doesn’t mean squat in Japan’ issue in a recent interview with Japanese iPhone and gadget video blogger Mame. Most of the interview is about the recent My Number ID for iPhone Apple Wallet launch but the last question covers ‘what exactly does Apple Pay mean in the Japanese payments market.’ Jennifer adroitly answers it without pivoting into complexity:
We have continued to work within the Japanese local landscape to support as many of the different payment types as possible…we support QUICPay, we support iD, we support Suica…we also support contactless A/B…We take a global platform like Apple Pay but we look to localize it in the market in the way that makes the most sense…as you noted the Japanese payments market is a very competitive market, there are lots of options here, but we have worked to support as many of those options as possible.
And they have. It’s nice she also mentions that Apple Pay in Japan will reach its 10 year anniversary in 2026 when Mobile Suica will be celebrating its 20th anniversary. Time flies.
It helps to understand what ‘Pay with Apple Pay’ means and the Apple technology behind it. The Apple Pay logo at store checkout and transit gates is branding and also hardware certification. The logo means that the NFC hardware supports Apple’s Enhanced Contactless Polling (ECP). Each NFC protocol has similar but different methods for telling the mobile device which card to use, EMV uses Application ID, MIFARE uses application directories, System Code/Service Code for FeliCa and so on.
Apple ECP smoothes out the polling process by selecting the right Apple Wallet card for the job. It’s behind Express Mode, VAR and more, the hidden essential half of ‘it just works Apple Pay’ for NFC reader infrastructure so that Apple Wallet can do what it does. POS checkout system vendors and transit operators have to go through Apple’s certification process to earn the Apple Pay logo or be listed on the Apple Wallet Transit page.
Getting back to Jennifer Bailey’s point about adding as many Japanese payment options as they can, Pay with Apple Pay has a completely different meaning here. In America it means the right EMV card is automatically selected. If you have VISA, Mastercard, AMEX and Discover cards in your Apple Wallet and the store reader only accepts VISA, Pay with Apple Pay correctly selects the VISA for you.
In japan there are so many payment options that saying Apple Pay only pulls up the default Wallet card, (and you also get VAS PONTA or dCard points at LAWSON convenience stores if you have one in Wallet). If you want to use a specific payment method, you have to specify it…like saying Suica, VISA Touch, WAON, nanaco, etc. I doubt that Japanese payment service providers are really dropping ‘Apple Pay’ certification as Apple Pay certification comes standard on STERA, AirPay, Rakuten, Square payment systems. But it could be that since Apple Pay in Japan only makes sense for VAR use at LAWSON, it’s not worth the extra certification effort and cost for some in-house store chain systems when they are already covered for basic NFC payment certification from EMV, FeliCa, etc.
There are indications that NFC Release 15 will have some kind of polling improvements like better multi-purpose tapping though we won’t find out until later this year when the specification is released to the public, and even then it could be years before we see results in real world use. I look forward to people complaining about ‘Pay with Apple Pay’ in Japan for a long time. I think it’s a good thing, truly.
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