Writing for The Verge, Dieter Bohn proclaimed that the most revolutionary product introduced by Apple at yesterday’s event was their Apple Pay mobile system.
“Most people that have worked on [mobile payments],” Cook told the audience, “have started by focusing on creating a business model that was centered around their self-interest instead of focusing on the user experience.” Bohn concurs with Tim Cook’s view but feels the situation is actually worse than that.
Dieter Bohn:
[su_quote] ..Google Wallet, though it has been rebranded and repurposed as an all-around solution for buying things through Google, was unable to overcome the incredibly strong entrenched interests in the payments space. Carriers, in the thick of developing Softcard, openly blocked Wallet on their branded devices without consequence — a peril of an open platform like Android. Google Wallet’s dynamic, straightforward, and intelligent VP Osama Bedier left for greener pastures just over a year ago — and Google’s ambitions for Wallet look much smaller today than when it originally launched.[/su_quote]
According to Bohn, Apple was able to overcome this issue with their new token system:
[su_quote] Apple’s foray into that same muck was much more successful…Apple will be taking a cut from each transaction. But Apple will not, according to Eddy Cue, be collecting any information about your transactions. Your credit card data and the information your purchases generate are all run through anonymized tokens that are said to be considerably more secure than a simple swipe.[/su_quote]
“We are at this very important moment in the industry,” Taneja says, “there is a common standard.” His company dedicated 750 people and a year of time to perfect it, and other companies like MasterCard dedicated similar efforts to their own implementations. But the more important thing is that there is a common implementation of this token system. It’s been a rare piece of collaboration and agreement between all the various players in the banking space, and it’s not much of a coincidence that it’s being implemented on Apple’s devices.
“James Anderson, group head and SVP, mobile and emerging payments at MasterCard, says that his company began working with Apple in 2013,” Bohn reports.
“Hopefully the various powers that control tiny parts of the rest of the ecosystem will find a way to do something equally simple on Android and Windows Phone,” Bohn concludes. “But even if Apple Pay fails, at the very least we got the moment yesterday when Apple’s CEO stood on stage and told the truth: mobile payments have sucked so far, and it’s high time somebody fixed it.”
