Why am I not content with Apple Pay?

Hari,

You are quite right to highlight the flaws in the use case - lack of P2P, inability to integrate with loyalty schemes, and the myriad different permutations for customer and sales staff (where present). The NFC aspect of the last of these may be more US centric (and we shall see how Samsung cope in a few weeks time), but from here in the UK NFC is now fairly well established.

But as you might note from my blog on the 9th, they are more worryingly introduncing additional security vulnerabilities that are quite unnecessary. Not only has the system failed to solve the above customer focussed aspects, it has singularly failed to address security in a meaningful way. As I put it on the 9th - Mere Tokenism.

As a marketer who is working on solutions to deliver targeted offers and coupons on mobile devices, I'm thrilled to read that there are consumers out there who value these things. That said, while launching Apple Pay, Apple categorically said that "when the payment is made with Apple Pay, the cashier won't know the consumer's name or card number." Therefore, it was obvious that Apple Pay wouldn't facilitate coupons etc. While that might’ve impacted merchant adoption, I’m sure that it has actually bolstered consumer adoption of Apple Pay: For every consumer who considers lack of coupon a shortcoming, there must be at least one other consumer who considers that as a virtue and a fulfillment of Apple’s promise not to share any transaction data with the merchant (or itself, for that matter).

Apple has the clout to make standards of its own but, by excluding P2P from Apple Pay, it has chosen to endorse the prevailing best practice of designing mobile apps as lightweight apps without tacking on too many features on to a single app. Maybe a separate P2P app is on the cards. Maybe Apple thinks P2P to be too small a market to bother with. Only time will tell.

Thanks Andrew for your comments. Much appreciated.

Kedar - thanks for your comments. Although Apple Pay may not know about the details of a payment, there are many other ways for Apple to find out about me and my behavior and actually, they know about me quite a lot. For example, when I land at my home airport, they can tell me how much time it would take to reach home depending on current traffic conditions! And I don't have to do anything on my iphone to get this insight.

Majority of consumers just want convenience and security. They don't think about how security is implemented or what data points are collected and stored before they adopt technology or products. Invariably the user experience and the perceived security drives adoption, not detailed less known secrets on how security is implemented.

@HariS: TY for your clarification. (1) Regardless of what Apple knows about you, Apple Pay doesn't reveal the identity of the user to merchant, therefore a merchant can't send instore coupons. That was known from Day One, even to a non-FanBoy Android lover like me! (2) From its very launch, Apple has emphasized security and privacy of Apple Pay, so I tend to think that people who may otherwise not care about these things would have given a lot of weightage to these perceived differentiators in this specific instance when they decided to adopt Apple Pay. Whether they understand implementation intricasies or not, they're smart enough to smell a rat if they ever receive an instore targeted offer from a merchant via Apple Pay! (3) In any case, Apple has left it to merchants to implement instore coupons in their own apps, powered by iBeacon - totally outside the core Apple Pay offering.