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This Man's Betting On The Technology Behind Apple Pay - And Even He Says It's Years Away From Wide Adoption

This article is more than 9 years old.

When Apple CEO Tim Cook unveiled Apple Pay in September, he predicted that it would "forever change the way all of us buy things.” As I wrote in a recent post, while he ultimately might be proven right, Apple's mobile wallet is likely to take years to catch on widely.

Although that assessment is nearly universally accepted among people who actually know how payments work, I got a lot of pushback on that from Apple fanatics as well as at least one Forbes contributor.

So I decided to ask someone who has bet at least partly on Apple Pay's eventual success: Osama Bedier, a former vice president at both PayPal and Google, where he headed the search giant's mobile wallet effort. Bedier is now founder and CEO of Poynt, which just announced plans to build a slick-looking smart point-of-sale terminal that can take most existing forms of payment--including those facilitated by Near Field Communication, the method used in both Apple Pay and Google Wallet to send data from a smartphone to the register. Suffice to say, when it comes to payments, Bedier not only knows what he's talking about, he's pretty agnostic about the many competing mobile payment methods.

His take? To start with the positive, he says Apple's timing looks good--not a surprising take, since Bedier's making the same bet that the timing is right. "Apple is good at jumping on bandwagons they think could take off," he says. That's in contrast, he notes, to Google, which "gets infatuated with technology"--though he also says that Google Wallet helped kickstart a move by tens of thousands of retail outlets to install NFC-capable readers.

Still, Bedier says, Apple Pay "isn't going to happen next year. It's going to take four years before it happens everywhere." What's more, Apple Pay works only on iPhones (and eventually Apple Watches), and that's unlikely to change soon, so Apple Pay won't be a standard except for iPhones.

That's OK, he adds, because Apple has gone with standard technologies such as NFC and secure chips on phones for payment data--indeed, helping to make them a widespread standard before long--so it could benefit even from competing efforts such as Google's that use the same or similar standards. As for those such as the trouble-plagued and still nonexistent Merchant Customer Exchange wallet that don't use these technologies, they will have trouble getting traction--most of all with consumers who may see no advantage to using them.

There's another less obvious but still important reason Apple's timing may be good, Bedier points out: If Apple Pay and NFC payments in general aren't really much more convenient or quick than swiping a card, EMV cards will actually be much worse, because you won't be able to simply swipe them quickly. You will have to insert the card into the reader, wait for approval, type in a PIN number or sign a receipt, and only then remove the card.

Compared with that more cumbersome process, tapping a smartphone to the terminal is going to seem like magic. "Smart phone payment will become much more attractive," says Bedier, and that will speed adoption of Apple Pay and other schemes like it.

Yet none of that changes the likely reality that we're still years away from anything like universal acceptance of smartphone payments--including Apple Pay. So keep that wallet handy.

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