Apple has announced that Apple Pay will be expanding to the United Kingdom from July.
The announcement was made at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco on June 8, and was somewhat of a surprise – though it was for certain that Pay would expand into Europe, July is earlier than expected. Fall was looking most likely, and would be expected that the UK would launch at the same time as the rest of Europe.
Jennifer Bailey, who heads up Apple’s payments program made the announcement on stage at WWDC and reiterated that Apple Pay had been hard at work at trying to replace our wallets.
She said that this fall Apple will have brought Pay to 50 million card members, and will surpass 1 million locations offering Apple Pay as soon as this month. Web purchases have also made paying for products or services within apps easier – apparently, companies have seen as many as two times the checkout conversions.
Back to the announcement of Apple Pay in the UK –
Apple has announced that Apple Pay will be expanding to the United Kingdom from July. The majority of UK banks, providing 70% of credit and debit cards in the country were preparing for Apple Pay, and over 250,000 locations in the UK would be offering Apple Pay on launch – more than when the payment technology first launched in the US.
Further updates to Apple Pay come via iOS 9 which was also announced at WWDC. Apple Pay can now hold store cards and rewards cards, such as those offered by JC Penny’s, Kohls and others.
Finally, it was announced that Apple would be changing the name of its Passbook app to Wallet.
Later in the presentation, it was also announced that these cards would be accessible via the Watch too, thanks to watchOS 2, which was also announced at the event.
The mobile payment system launched in the US in 2014, alongside the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. However, it has been slow to expand to other territories and the UK represents the first company to access the payment tech outside of the US.