Apple Announces Apple Pay

Confirming rumors from the last couple weeks, the new iPhone 6 models and the Apple Watch will come equipped with a new feature called Apple Pay, a service that will allow iPhone users to pay for products and services via NFC.

Users can add their credit cards to their iPhone 6 smartphones via iTunes, or by taking photos of their cards and adding it to their digital wallets. Each iPhone also utilizes tokenization – which we heard about yesterday – along with Touch ID, NFC, and a Secure Element to allow for point and click payments. Apple also boasted about how using Apple Pay won’t give Apple any of the relevant shopping information.

American Express, MasterCard, and Visa are the three major credit card companies partnering with Apple for Apple Pay in the United States. Meanwhile, a huge list of physical and online retailers have teamed up with Apple to make Apple Pay happen: Macy’s, Walgreens, Panera, McDonald’s, Nike, Toys R Us, Disney, and more.

From what we heard at the event, Apple wants to make Apple Pay the next big thing in retail, and they have the clout to do it. One has to wonder, though, whether Apple can succeed where similar initiatives – like Google Wallet – have failed so far.