BNZ joins rival in offering Apple Pay
Kiwis’ fondness of eftpos may hinder the adoption of Apple Pay and other new payment technology.
Bank of New Zealand has revealed it will join ANZ in offering Apple Pay, which allows users to make cashless credit card transactions with their Apple devices.
It relies on retailers offering the technology to accept the payments. Android Pay and Samsung Pay are similar systems offered for Apple’s competitors’ devices.
BNZ director of products and technology David Bullock said the development had been prompted by customer feedback.
He expected high demand. ‘‘More and more retailers are accepting it. There’s a fairly high acceptance rate in New Zealand.’’
He said it should be simple for customers to set up.
Technology commentator Paul Spain said there seemed to be growing interest in the offer.
‘‘You see the Apple Pay logo turning up on things more and more,’’ he said. ‘‘That said, it’s still not that widely adopted.’’
He said he had used Apple Pay in a shop recently and the teller had not seen it before.
That should change as more people became used to doing more on their smartphones and the tapto-pay capability became more widespread in shops, he said.
‘‘But there’s a real limitation in New Zealand because we’ve heavily adopted eftpos and it works so well for retailers.’’
Shop do not pay a commission for accepting eftpos payments. By contrast, credit card payments can cost retailers about 1.7 per cent of the total to accept, while contact debit cards cost about 1 per cent.
BNZ has not set a firm launch date but it is expected this month.