Apple has revealed its mobile payments play, and it features NFC and Touch ID, as many expected. The system works as fast as they joked it did on stage – which is why in our demo we ran through a number of different payment scenarios.
Essentially, with the new iPhones, a user holds their phone near a payment terminal, and the payment card they’ve set as a default is called up, prompting a Touch ID action where the user authenticates their transaction.
This system is similar in practice to a lot of existing ones, but Apple has done a lot of work to remove even more friction than most others. You can use cards already stored in your iTunes account, for instance, or add them simply using your iPhone’s camera.
The Apple Watch works for Apple Pay in the same way, so you can imagine what it will look like based on the demo above. It doesn’t require fingerprint authentication, however, so it’s likely we’ll see payment card providers put transaction limits of a certain number of dollars on payments made with Apple Watch alone.
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