Apple Pay Not Living Up To The Hype

American Banker is reporting that banks are not terribly happy with their customer’s adoption (or not) of Apple Pay.  This probably has less to do with anything that Apple did or did not do, but rather with the fact that people don’t deal with change very well.

While 84% of the banks reported they were involved in a mobile payments rollout when surveyed in January of this year, only 0.68% or less than one percent of the eligible debit cards were enrolled in Apple pay.

To make matters worse, the same survey said that consumers were only making 0.34 transactions per month per enrolled card.  That means that they use Apple Pay once every 3 months.

Suntrust Bank reported that 15% of the iPhone 6 owners had set up a card on their phone and 25% of the 15% had made at least one transaction.

On the small bank side, First Financial CU reported that of their 65,000 members, 48% are iPhone users and 345 of them use Apple Pay.

While it is way to early to predict the demise of Apple Pay or any of it’s competitors, the early forecast of kicking MC and Visa off their throne was clearly a bit optimistic.

It seems to indicate that it is going to take something big to get consumers to change their ways.  It is just too simple to take your credit card out of your pocket and slam it into the checkout terminal.

In addition, predictions of merchants saving money due to lower interchange fees and Apple getting richer over transaction fees were both a bit overly optimistic.

Information for this post came from American Banker and Payments Source.

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