Wise Guys on WHO Radio - October 21, 2014
The WHO Radio Wise Guys airs on WHO Radio in Des Moines, Iowa on 1040 AM or streaming online at WHORadio.com. The show airs from 1 to 2 pm Central Time on Saturday afternoons. A podcast of show highlights is also available. Leave comments and questions on the Wise Guys Facebook page or e-mail them to wiseguys@whoradio.com.
Notes on today's conversation with Simon Conway (on his show) about Apple Pay:
Apple Pay is out on the iPhone 6. Any discussion of Apple Pay should be tethered to one about Google Wallet, which has been available for some time and does basically the same things. In order to use the services outside of apps, you'll have to enable the Near-Field Communications (NFC) radio on your phone and be using a pay terminal that accepts those signals.
NFC devices aren't found everywhere, but acceptance is growing and will ultimately move in step with the shift to EMV credit cards, which will pretty much be complete in the next two to three years. Merchants will have to spend money on new payment-acceptance terminals for the EMV cards, so they're probably going to be nudged into accepting NFC payments at the same time. (The new EMV cards, by the way, should be much more secure for in-person transactions but won't help online transaction security, so crooks are going to shift their attention to online fraud in a big way.)
All of these transitions are going to come with stumbling blocks (early reviews of Apple Pay indicate that adoption is going to be a bit lumpy), but the biggest concern will be security and the question of whether the vulnerabilities inherent to using your smartphone for things will be offset by the additional security to be gained by the increased security applied to the payments system. If nothing else, it's an excellent reason to remind people to put some kind of reputable security program on their smartphones.