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Apple Said To Team With Visa, MasterCard On iPhone Wallet
An anonymous reader writes with news about a possible partnership between Apple and major credit card companies. Apple plans to turn its next iPhone into a mobile wallet through a partnership with major payment networks, banks and retailers, according a person familiar with the situation. The agreement includes Visa, MasterCard, and American Express and will be unveiled on Sept. 9 along with the next iPhone, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the talks are private. The new iPhone will make mobile payment easier by including a near-field communication chip for the first time, the person said. That advancement along with Touch ID, a fingerprint recognition reader that debuted on the most recent iPhone, will allow consumers to securely pay for items in a store with the touch of a finger.
This will be good because it might finally get businesses serious about exception NFC transactions. As long as it's not some proprietary bullshit on Apple's end, of course.
The cost of handling transactions is steadily diminishing. There was a time it would cost you something between 49$ and 149$ to place a single trade. It dropped to well below 10$ when I was still trading. Would not be surprised if they give you money to place a trade or something now. Compare it to the debit card transaction.
When it comes to creditcard I would not begrudge the 2% to 5% fee charged to the merchants. The credit card companies are essentially advancing an unsecured loan, and it would cost the individual merchants much more to check and advance credit to their customers. (Of course it there is some real competition the percentage might come down). But it is the debit card transaction that is atrocious. Money comes from the bank, there is no risk involved. There was a very nice system, including PIN numbers to manage the POS terminals. Way back when stock trade was 49$, it was 25 cent per transaction irrespective of the size of transaction. This should have become zero. But that is not what happened.
The Visa and Mastecard combined to discourage ATM cards and the POS terminals and undermined the system. They made debit and credit card to go through the same system. And the merchants were forced to pay 2% transaction fees on risk free money transfer from one bank to another.
The time is ripe, with prepaid cards and stored value cards for really cheap and free micro transactions. It took the clout of Apple to hit the music executives on their head and make them wake up, smell the coffee and realize the days of selling single track with 10 more useless tracks for 19$ per CD are gone. It might take such a juggernaut like Apple to make the bankers come around the bend and give up their 2% commission on risk free transactions.
But I wish we are not going from the duopoly of MC + Visa to a monopoly of AppStore. Well one thing at a time. Once the bankers get used to lower fees commensurate with the cost of transactions, may be alternatives to AppStore might emerge, and the system might become more open.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
That's just 4chan rumours at the moment. No point in taking them seriously unless there's confirmation.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
It appears to be confirmed now: http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/...
Worryingly some of the affected claim that the images which were leaked had been deleted years ago. If you want your iCloud account deleted rather than just made inactive you have to call Apple and get a tech to call you back.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC