NFC TIMES Exclusive Insight – Commonwealth Bank of Australia, one of Australia’s largest banks, has said its mobile wallet transactions have increased by nearly three times in the two months since introducing Apple Pay, according to a report, though the bank declines to release any actual transaction figures, and mobile transactions still are believed to make up a very small percentage of total transactions.
The jump could also indicate that not many people were using CBA cards in Google Pay, Samsung Pay, Fitbit Pay, Garmin Pay and the bank’s own mobile app leading up to its adoption of Apple Pay. Still, the fact that CBA is talking about strong initial results with Apple Pay is a far cry from its posture when Apple launched the payments service in Australia in 2016.
Then, the bank joined with two of the other big four Australian banks, National Australia Bank and Westpac, along with Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, in an unprecedented move to ask the country’s Competition and Consumer Commission for permission to bargain collectively with Apple to try to gain access to the tech giant’s NFC technology in its iPhones. The banks said they would jointly boycott participation in Apple Pay during the negotiations.
