New Apple Pay features coming soon: NFC tags that trigger purchases when tapped, loyalty cards in the Wallet app & more

Jennifer Bailey, the iPhone maker’s Vice President of Apple Pay, announced yesterday during the TRANSACT industry conference in Las Vegas support for specially-encoded NFC tags and partnerships with Bird scooters, Bonobos clothing store and PayByPhone parking meters.

According to Scott Harkey and Steve Moser, that means you’ll be able to read special NFC tags typically printed on stickers that you would find on electric scooters—as opposed to requiring an NFC terminal to complete an Apple Pay transaction. The Apple Pay interface is brought up simply by holding your iPhone near an NFC sticker.

For instance, these stickers are commonly found on parking meters, which will make it especially convenient to just tap your phone on one in order to pay for parking without having to use any third-party app at all. Last but not least, Bailey announced that NFC tags will even permit iPhone owners to sign up for loyalty cards within the Wallet app, with just a tap.

Additional support for these features aside from the aforementioned launch partners is coming later this year with Dairy Queen, Panera Bread, Yogurtland, Jimmy John’s, Dave & Busters and Caribou Coffee all debuting their loyalty cards in the Wallet app.

All of the Apple Pay improvements described in this write-up are arriving later in the year, but exact timeframe wasn’t provided at the time of this writing. Apple Pay is an absolutely indispensable service and I’m glad Apple’s been perfecting it since its inception.

How do you like these new Apple Pay features?