NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Apple on Wednesday expanded support for closed-loop transit payments across China, incorporating China’s T-Union interoperable transit cards in its Apple Pay service.
Apple, which like other NFC-based Pays wallets, has a low mobile payments market share in China in the face of competition with dominant wallet apps Alipay and WeChat Pay. That’s one reason Apple wants to increase the utility of its Apple Pay service by supporting transit payments in more cities in the massive Chinese payments market. Of course, Ant Financial’s Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat Pay, which both use QR codes for transmission of data between smartphones and terminals, also support transit payments throughout China.
And Apple is by no means the only NFC Pays wallet that enables T-Union cards in China for transit payments. Huawei Pay and Mi Pay from Xiaomi also support a range of cities, and Samsung Pay and Meizu Pay also back interoperable transit cards in some of the same cities.