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MCX has an alternative to Apple’s mobile payment system and will surely create hurdles for Apple Pay.
It’s barely been seven days and already Apple’s mobile wallet is proving to be a tough match for rivals. And the rivals which include MCX have decided to fight back tooth and nail. This decision dates back to the time before Apple Pay even got off the ground.
The Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX), which consists of 50 organizations, took the radical step of denying the very fact that Apple Pay existed. Best Buy, Gap and Walmart are some of the huge companies that come under this umbrella group. It is not as if they don’t have their eyes on a mobile wallet system.
What they do see happening is the retailers coming to guesstimate stuff regarding their customers’ habits via the system. This of course will allow merchants to forgo the steep rates they pay when processing smart money deals.
However, MCX has a few cards up its sleeve. A competing app by the name of CurrentC which will get attached directly to the bank account or credit card is in the pipeline. This facility will be accessible starting from next year.
The only hitch is that under the bond they have signed with MCX, these retailers are not supposed to accept competing systems such as Apple Pay. According to these retailers, who spoke on the condition of having their anonymity maintained, they will have to pay extremely high fines if they used the rival’s payment methodology.
Thus to sever the contract is an unthinkable proposal. Members of MCX such as Rite Aid and CVS have disabled Apple Pay technology for the sheer sake of strictly sticking to the contract. Also Walmart, Target and Best Buy have refused Apple Pay as a method of payment.
What is paramount here is a mobile pay market that sometime in the future /4/be worth almost a hundred billion dollars. As the seconds keep slipping away, Apple Pay continues to rule the roost and MCX along with its CurrentC method /4/end up being the loser by default.
Meanwhile, things are in somewhat of a chaotic theocrasia as technological giants wheel and deal in their schemata to get ahead in the global competitive market of goods and services.
Source: NYTimes
