Apple Pay coming to Germany - 7 Eleven, and CVS Pharmacy in the US

This afternoon, Apple held an earnings call where CEO Tim Cook announced that Apple Pay made over 1 billion transactions this quarter alone. In fact, Apple Pay made more transactions than its competitors Square and PayPal.

Cook also announced that Apple Pay will finally be supported at 7 Eleven and CVS Pharmacy stores sometime in the fall. If you have been following the story with CVS from almost four years ago, the store began to accept NFC payments until it disabled its NFC readers in favor of another QR-code mobile wallet called “CurrentC”.

Well, it wasn’t CVS’ fault, this was due to the retailer (among others like WalMart, Best Buy, Rite Aid) being a member of the Merchant Customer Exchange, which realized that by making its own wallet solution, it would save big money on transaction fees from credit card providers, but offered no real incentive to those customers who were never really able to be convinced to sign up for it. It also only worked with checking accounts, so no credit cards were accepted on the platform.

Two years after CVS disabled NFC terminals, CurrentC shut down (to nobody’s surprise). Fast-forward to 2018 now Apple Pay will be accepted in the two popular convenience stores, which should also accept other NFC-based mobile wallet services like Google Pay, Samsung Pay, and FitBit Pay.

Via 1 | Via 2