China’s Apple Pay launch reaches a dividing line

Apple has been in talks with the banks but all seems to fail

According to the recent report by MarketWatch it has become clear that Apple and Union Pay cannot reach an agreement as to how Apple Pay is going to be launched in China and with a few days having passed since the debut of the iOS 8.3, this sure seems to be an unpleasant situation for both the companies as we are well aware that the feature was to make its debut along with the updated iOS last week.

MarketWatch had previously been pegging about the service to launch by March but later commented that talks between Apple and UnionPay hadn’t turned out as expected. Even today we are not yet aware of what the release timeline for the NFC-based service is going to be. It seems likely that Apple isn’t in the bargaining position with UnionPay which is currently responsible for all interbank transactions in mainland China.

However, this still doesn’t mean that Apple has only approached UnionPay. The Cupertino company had also been engaged with eight major Chinese banks last year but unfortunately all these talks didn’t turn out well. Apple’s fee structure is also not acceptable by the Chinese banks and this is the major obstacle in obtaining the Chinese ratification. Back in the US, Apple takes 0.15 percent of a 2 percent per-payment merchant fee in addition to half-cent per-transaction charge. Apparently these percentages are too high for the Chinese banks.