Apple Pay: JPMorgan's Windowless War Room, Tokens and the CurrentC Revolt

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Work on Apple Pay began in January 2013, when Apple brought Visa, Mastercard and American Express into a joint effort under heavy secrecy. JPMorgan set up a windowless war room where only about 100 of 300 staff knew the partner was Apple, and Visa had 750 people working on anonymized tokens for a year. Tim Cook unveiled Apple Pay on September 9, 2014 at the iPhone 6 event, calling the magnetic stripe broken. The system replaces the card's Funding Primary Account Number with a Device Primary Account Number stored in the phone's Embedded Secure Element, generates a one-time cryptogram for each payment over short-range NFC, and keeps Apple out of the transaction data.

Biometric verification through Touch ID, Face ID or a passcode lets Apple Pay bypass contactless limits such as 100 pounds in the UK. Consumers registered one million cards in three days, but Rite Aid and CVS disabled their NFC readers to back CurrentC, a QR code system from the Merchant Customer Exchange, whose members included Walmart and Best Buy, built to avoid card swipe fees. Rite Aid reversed course in August 2015 and Walmart began rolling out Apple Pay in August 2026. Apple takes 0.15 percent of US purchases, and in 2024 the Justice Department filed an antitrust suit while the European Commission probed Apple's control of the iPhone's NFC chip.

• Transport for London became the UK's most used Apple Pay merchant.
• Apple adapted its hardware for Japan's Suica cards on FeliCa, which completes a tap in about 0.1 seconds.
• Apple's cut in Europe is smaller because EU rules cap credit card interchange fees at 0.3 percent, and Swiss banks pay a quarterly fee per card.
• Apple Cash, which offers peer-to-peer payments in iMessage, has been moving from Discover to Visa.
• Affinity Credit Union filed a class action arguing Apple limits users' choice of non-Apple payment options.