14 DAY TRIAL // Apple is preparing to roll out its contactless payment service Internationally, and the first country on the list of new receivers appears to be Canada.
Sources close to the company say that Canadian banks and card issuers are currently in talks with the California tech giant to debut the service there “sometime in the first half of this year,” according to 9to5mac.
Because Apple and these launch partners are planning to release advertising and other promotional materials in March, it is believed that Apple Pay could debut as early as then. In fact, several other sources said that Apple was indeed eyeing the March period for launching its payment service.
International rollout
News first broke out that Apple was expanding the service internationally late last year, when the company accidentally posted a job opening to roll out the service in EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Asia). The UK is also on the list of countries set to begin using Apple Pay. Apple reportedly plans to launch the service there in the first half of the year.
Currently, Apple Pay is only available for customers in the United States, where the service is already enjoying quite a bit of popularity. Research showed that Apple Pay accounted for a full 1% of contactless transactions in its first month.
Compatible hardware
Apple Pay is supported on different devices in different ways. iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus allow customers to pay at the register by waving their device in front of a sensor and authenticating with their fingerprint, using the phone’s Touch ID sensor.
iPads – which lack the necessary NFC (near field communication) chips – only permit online transactions. The upcoming Apple Watch will work the same as the iPhone 6 when it comes to Apple Pay purchases, but instead of fingerprint ID, the device will only require a button press.