NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Apple has continued to expand its NFC payments service, today launching Apple Pay in Spain, with participation from one of the country’s biggest banks, Banco Santander, and two payments networks, Mastercard and American Express.
Today’s launch features no other major Spanish banks, though it does include the bank of large France-based retailer Carrefour, meal voucher card issuer Edenred with its Ticket Restaurant card and American Express as an issuer. Apple had earlier announced its plans to launch in the country.
Santander, by some measures the country’s largest bank, says it will make both debit and credit cards available for Apple’s Wallet. The bank has nearly 3 million digital banking customers in Spain, of which 1.3 million use the bank’s mobile-banking app. Although the majority of mobile-banking customers access the service on Android phones, around 30%, or close to 400,000, are using iPhones for mobile banking, a spokesman told NFC Times. That helped convince Santander to support Apple Pay, in order to offer a mobile payments service to its customers using eligible iPhones, he indicated.
