Apple Pay Was Useful, Apple ID Will Be Indispensable

Dateline: London, 29th January 2025.Since ApplePay went live a decade ago, we have seen big changes in the way we pay, although contactless cards would have been huge without or without Apple. The next decade will see even bigger changes, because it is not about cards any more it is about the wallets. And the Apple Wallet will change everything, not because stores payments but because it stores identities.Subscribe nowMobile Payments Were InevitableWhen I first downloaded ApplePay and went off to try it out in London, paying by phone was already old hat. I had been paying using my phone for quite a while, because my phone had a contactless sticker containing an EMV chip with an RFID antenna attached to it. I loved that sticker: it had a Barclaycard token in it and I used it all the time and went around annoying everyone by telling them that stickers would be the future of payments because the banks and the telcos would never get their act together to make NFC payments work properly, despite the fact that it was obvious from earliest days that allowing consumers to pay with their phones would be absolutely huge.I’m not saying that with perfect hindsight, by the way. I was utterly convinced that mobile payments would be the future from the first time I saw someone use an SMS to buy a can of Coke from a vending machine in the very earliest days of mobile commerce and long before I watched how…Apple Pay Was Useful, Apple ID Will Be Indispensable