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Why does the alternative to humans need to be AI / ML? Trade automation can happen via heuristics as well. Memory serves, according to "Flash Boys" by Michael Lewis, algo trading has accounted for a majority of NYSE trading volumes for nearly a decade. I find it hard to accept the finding of this study.

QR is only the form factor, keen to know your predictions on underlying funding source. In India, QR is a blockbuster success where funding source is bank account via UPI. However, where the funding source is credit card, Bharat QR, which uses QR as POS replacement, has been a flop.

Stateside, before Apple Pay / Google Pay / Samsung Pay entered the market, QR was the most successful form factor for closed loop mobile wallets in the form of merchant wallets like Starbucks, which were funded with credit card. But I don't think QR has taken off in open loop situations based on credit card or A2A / Zelle as funding sources.

It's clear that funding source aka rails matters a lot. 

TY @ChrisStewart. 

Whenever Apple enters the scene, hardware steals the show whereas IMO the real value / innovation / differentiation comes from the software, regardless of the handset. 

There's a fintech in India called Pine Labs. Apart from basic POS feature, it provides value-added functionality that, among others, helps merchants optimize interchange costs by automatically routing a transaction to the acquirer bank that offers the most attractive terms for the given transaction. AFAIK, it runs on both Android and iPhone handsets.

Anyone knows if Apple will offer similar value-added functionality or just the basic POS feature?

@ChrisStewart: LOL amidst the Fintech Disruption Kool-Aid, I totally forgot about EMVCo! Any idea if all the iPhones using dongles from Square, iZettle etc. have approval of EMVCo to work as POS terminal?

@StephenWilson:

Agree that some kind of proxy ID is required to make sense of anonymous comments. At one point, every comment on Finextra.com would appear as a post on the Twitter handle of @Finextra. Even if the comment was posted anonymously, the tweet would display the commenter's name. I miss those days! 

As I said in a an earlier comment, if a merchant rings up a payment on POS terminal, contactless cards in the vicinity can get charged without any authentication if the payment value is lower than the PINless threshold. Of course, that's true whether the POS is an iPhone or even a "traditional" verifone / ingenico POS terminal. 

I'd think authentication would defeat the basic purpose of contactless payment, which is to make the payment frictionless by eliminating the need to enter PIN etc. for transactions below a certain threshold value?

In a PINless, contactless regime, the risk of random payments happening has always been, in theory, The Clear And Present Danger With NFC Payments. Now, I wrote that post 10 years ago. That the sky has not fallen on random payments yet suggests there's some inbuilt check. Maybe the iPhone can accept contactless payments only when it's in the mode where the merchant has rung up a payment? Since most iPhones will not be in that mode most of the times, we don't see random payments happening as often as PIN-less transaction regime would seem to suggest?

If Apple is not bundling a Merchant Account, then it will not be a serious threat to Square. Although Square is identified with its hardware dongle, IMO its blockbuster success comes from its Merchant Aggregation model whereby it issues sub-merchant account to merchants who wouldn't qualify for one directly from an Acquirer Bank.

Fintech couldn't even disrupt a battered traditional bank. Tch tch...

Anyone knows if Apple bundles a Merchant Account, the way Square does?

Yet another fintech initiative for which middleground between Leveraging Regulatory Gap and Waiting for Godot has not worked.

Meta considers selling off Diem assets as Zuckerberg's crypto ambitions crumble

Yet another fintech initiative for which middleground between Leveraging Regulatory Gap and Waiting for Godot has not worked.

Fintechs Need Guts More Than Lawyers