Here’s Our First Look At Apple’s Tap To Pay In Action

With Tap to Pay for iPhones, Apple is going after established players in the game such as Square, which offers contactless payment hardware and services to a diverse clientele. Even though it’s hard to predict if the wide release of Apple’s solution can trigger a dramatic industry-wide change, the product definitely has attracted antitrust scrutiny prior to its international rollout.

EU regulators have already targeted Apple for abusing its dominant position in the contactless payments market by limiting competitors from accessing the NFC chips inside iPhones and keeping it exclusive to Apple Pay. Apple, on the other hand, has denied the allegations and claims that it has ensured a fair playing ground for everyone when it comes to NFC functionality access. Tap to Pay on iPhones already has a tinge of problematic exclusivity to it and it is poised to draw more anti-competitive scrutiny.

Apple wrote in its official announcement post that contactless payment via Tap to Pay on iPhone will be available “through a supporting iOS app.” That means rival merchants and financial institutions such as PayPal, Square, Chase, and American Express can’t create their own payments app with a different user interface and set of features for offering the iPhone-to-iPhone contactless payment facility. And the reason for doing so is most likely because Apple wants to charge a fee for transactions made via its payments services and products.