Australian banks have agreed to accept payments made on mobile devices using Google Inc’s Android Pay, leaving Apple Inc’s rival Apple Pay system out in the cold as the tech giant struggles to coax lenders to accept its terms.
Banks including Westpac Banking Corp, ANZ Banking Group and Macquarie are to accept contactless payments via Android smartphones when Google rolls out the service in the first half of next year, the company said yesterday. Westpac and Commonwealth Bank of Australia already operate their own mobile payment systems.
In contrast, Apple remains locked in talks with big banks in search of a deal to accept Apple Pay. The iPhone maker’s system was launched in Australia last month, with support for American Express Co cards, but remains adrift from 80 percent of consumers using other credit cards in a market Westpac sees as worth more than US$2 billion this year.
“It’s a big bargaining chip for [Australian] banks to use to force a better deal with Apple,” Telsyte managing director Foad Fadaghi said.
An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment.
Android Pay is to support both MasterCard and Visa credit and debit cards, Google director of product management Pali Bhat wrote in a blog post yesterday.
Companies such has McDonald’s Corp and Domino’s Pizza have also signed up, Google said, enhancing Android Pay’s appeal.
The absence of a deal on Apple Pay hinges on banks’ unwillingness to give up a slice of a market for contactless payments they have cultivated that is now much larger than in many other nations.
More than 60 percent of all card transactions in Australia are now contactless, ANZ bank yesterday said in a statement, announcing the Android Pay tie-up.
In the US, a survey by Verifone and Wakefield Research released in January this year found mobile wallets accounted for just about 4 percent of the overall payments market for in-store retail transactions.
Fees in Australia’s lucrative mobile payments market remain a bone of contention in Apple’s talks with the main banks.
Apple is demanding 15 basis points in interchange fees that banks have refused to share, people familiar with such negotiations said. Android Pay has no such charges, the sources said.
“The four Australian banks aren’t prepared to give up the amount of interchange fees that the US, Canadian and UK banks have done,” McLean Roche payments consultant Grant Halverson said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained