You Could Fill Up At The Pump With Apple Pay Starting Next Year

Apple is working to expand the reach of Apple Pay, and its next major destination might be the gas pumps. Chevron’s official Twitter account revealed yesterday (via Business Insider) that the gas company is working to make Apple Pay available at its fill-up stations in the U.S. Pump payments are a key ingredient to making Apple Pay truly a convenient, complete replacement for traditional payment cards.

The Chevron account originally tweeted that they hoped to offer Apple Pay at their pumps as soon as early 2015, but then changed their tune to state that there wasn’t actually any official timeline in place, but that they were indeed working with Apple to make it happen.

As the payment system already works with NFC terminals that have presence in some stores, and with a range of payment providers, Chevron and Texaco already do technically accept Apple Pay, but the at-pump payments would be a first that would make for much more convenient transactions overall. Card-based payment at the pump is a huge boon for drivers, and NFC terminals built in to the pumps would make it even easier to fuel up with Apple’s new online payment solution.

Already, Apple is expanding the reach of Apple Pay quickly, and it can lay claim to being among the most successful mobile payments initiatives in existence despite its relative youth, simply because few other offerings have really achieved much traction with the overall consumer population. Apple Pay accounted for 1 percent of digital transactions in November according to research firm ITG, which reveals it to be a strong competitor to PayPal, the only other player out there achieving much success.

Achieving critical mass for a system like Apple Pay now depends on winning retailers and various consumer-facing verticals over to Appel’s side – nothing short of omnipresent acceptance will let it do more than linger in the low single digits of digital transactions.