Filip Novotny One of the main players in the field of payment cards is preparing a field for the Apple Pay service. Visa Europe announced on Tuesday that it will introduce a security feature called tokenization in the coming months, which is one of the main aspects of Apple Pay.
The use of this technology in practice means that during contactless payment, no payment card details are transmitted, but only a security token. This means another level of security, which is especially desirable for mobile phone payments. Apple refers to this technology as one of the main advantages over classic payment cards.
In the United States, tokenization is already commonly used, and Apple Pay is slowly starting to be supported by more and more banks and merchants. However, neither Visa's European arm nor its California partner have yet said how many banks on the old continent will support Apple Pay.
Due to the nature of the service, Apple will have to conclude a number of contracts with banking institutions in Europe, just like in the US, but it also has one advantage compared to its home continent. Thanks to the much higher popularity of contactless payments, Apple does not have to convince its partners to upgrade their payment terminals.
In addition to Apple Pay, competing services are likely to use the new security. "Tokenization is one of the most important technologies in the field of digital payments and has the potential to start a whole new chapter among newly developed products," said Sandra Alzett, one of the heads of Visa Europe.
Bratislava is paypass/paywave ready :) Do you think there will be Apple Pay this year?
Everyone pretends to arrange it all, and apparently not only Apple is interested in it, but everyone else as well. Europe as such is ready (more so than the USA), it will be "just" an agreement between Apple, banks and card issuers.