NFC TIMES Exclusive – Restaurant loyalty platform vendor Punchh could enable its delayed single-tap loyalty and rewards service with Apple Pay in the second quarter of this year at as many as six quick-service and fast-casual restaurant chains, the vendor told NFC Times.
The rollout was supposed to launch by the end of last year and was likely delayed at least in part because of technology challenges. And while Apple and Google continue to push their respective one-tap NFC technologies to combine payments and rewards or offers at the point of sale, they are in danger of falling further behind so-called lifestyle app providers and possibly also merchants that are more seamlessly weaving payments into their apps, using QR codes to enable consumers to communicate at the point of sale while applying the value-added services on the back end.
The best examples of the lifestyle apps are Ant Financial’s Alipay and Tencent Holdings’ WeChat Pay, which are capitalizing on their connections to users' bank accounts with no fees from the banks, massive amounts of data they collect and their protected market positions in China to dominate mobile payments there. They are making payments part of a range of online and offline services they offer.
