Last evening, American Express began airing its inaugural television commercial for Apple Pay.
Conceived as the evolution of AmEx, the commercial, called “Retrospective,” uses some of AmEx's best-known ads featuring celebrities such as Jerry Seinfeld, Jim Henson, Tina Fey, Jackie Chan and Martin Scorsese (who also starred in Apple's Sir ad).
“American Express’ timeless safety and security are now available on Apple Pay,” the ad proclaims. “The next evolution of membership is here.”
USA Technologies announced on Tuesday that it will be bringing Apple Pay support to 200,000 acceptance points, which includes owners and operators of coffee brewers, vending machines, kiosks, laundry equipment, parking pay stations and other self-serve appliances.
Western Union just issued a press release this morning announcing that its rolling out support for Apple Pay at thousands of its flagship locations and kiosks. By accepting Apple Pay, customers will be able to transfer money and pay bills via Western Union with their iPhone and Apple Pay.
MasterCard announced on Monday that it's bringing Apple Pay to the PGA Tour, starting with the Waste Management Phoenix Open in Phoenix, Arizona later this week.
Thursday, the United States Patent and Trademark Office published a very interesting and curious patent application by Apple which describes a technology seeking to synchronize Touch ID fingerprint data between devices through iCloud.
Titled “Finger biometric sensor data synchronization via a cloud computing device and related methods,” the invention would permit biometric data to be collected on a primary device, say your iPhone, and then uploaded to iCloud for dissemination to secondary devices.
Banking-giant Bank of America announced on Thursday that 800,000 of its customers have enrolled to use Apple Pay, adding roughly 1.1 million cards to the service that was released within iOS 8.1 in October.
Verifone, a company that boasts it connects more than 27 million payment devices to the cloud, has announced a new point of sale (POS) system that aims to work with any smartphone on the market, and could be a huge boost for Apple to get Apple Pay more widely adopted in stores.
The PAYware Mobile e355, the newest mPOS terminal from Verifone, frees merchants from consumer technology upgrade cycles and adapts to multiple OS options, the company says. "It is a flexible, long-lasting device that can accommodate different form factors and outlive smartphone and tablet models."
Apple plans to extend Apple Pay past the US and into Canada sooner than expected. 9to5mac reports on Friday that Apple will kick-off the international launch of Apple Pay in Canada as early as March.
Apple on Thursday announced that the first week of January set a new record for billings from the App Store, with customers around the world spending nearly half a billion dollars on apps and in-app purchases. It also revealed New Year’s Day 2015 marked the single biggest day ever in App Store sales history, as customers presumably used gift cards and took advantage of App Store sales.
The city of New York is considering Apple Pay as a way for its citizens to pay for the eight to ten million parking tickets it issues a year, according to MarketWatch, moving from an outdated system where tickets are paid online, in person, or through the mail.
Oil giant Chevron is working alongside Apple to develop solutions to integrate Apple Pay directly with its gas pumps in 2015, to allow customers to pay with their phone directly at the pump, the company revealed in a tweet on Monday.
Apple's NFC-powered mobile payments service Apple Pay is due to hit the UK market in the first half of 2015, after gaining some ground in the US at the end of this year, reports The Telegraph.
The British publication didn't name which banks specifically are in talks with Apple, but reported "at least one of the biggest banks" has been tricky in negotiating with the company.