American Express and Visa Love Apple Pay. Will Consumers?

One of the least heralded events at Apple’s Sept. 9 unveiling of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus was its primer on Apple Pay. In an eight-second video, a woman holding an iPhone next to the credit card reader at a checkout counter placed her thumb over her phone’s Home button, which doubles as a fingerprint scanner. The device binged: transaction complete. “Would you like to see it one more time,” Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook asked from the stage, “just in case you may have blinked and missed it?”

Simplicity is Apple’s pitch as it leaps into mobile payments, which Forrester Research estimates will total $31 billion this year and $90 billion in 2017. So far Square, Google, and Softcard—a wallet app backed by the three largest U.S. wireless carriers—have struggled to prove to retailers that they have a winning system. That’s been largely a chicken-and-egg problem: Both merchants and software developers have had trouble convincing consumers that loading a smartphone app is easier than whipping out a credit card. “Most people that have worked on this have started by focusing on creating a business model that was centered on their self-interest instead of focusing on the user experience,” Cook said at the iPhone launch.