Reports Suggest Apple Will Enter Mobile Payments Space

According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple is looking to expand its presence into the mobile-payments space as Apple’s senior vice-president, Eddy Cue, has begun making inquiries into the possibility of Apple handling payments for physical goods and services. Though services like Square, PayPal and Stripe have dominated the space thus far, Apple’s note-worthy lack of NFC adoption has always meant that they’d have to come up with their own technology or their own software solutions. They tried – and largely failed – with Passbook, much like Google Wallet, but the iTunes store has a cache of over 400 million credit card accounts that are active, so if Apple can figure out a good method to leverage this wealth of knowledge, it could become a major player in the mobile payments space very quickly. With the combination of TouchID to verify users’ identities, and the new iBeacon BLE technology, Apple may have already laid the foundations, technologically speaking. Knowing Apple, they’ll take some time to put all of the pieces together, but when they do it could be a very potent medium.