Apple Pay might get a lift from Starbucks Corp, among other other restaurant chains.
On Thursday, Jennifer Bailey, vice president of Apple Pay, said some Starbucks stores would accept Apple Pay, a mobile payments system, this year as part of a pilot program.
Bailey made the announcement at the Code Mobile conference, a tech industry event, where she added that all Starbucks stores would accept Apple Pay sometime next year. Restaurant chains KFC and Chili’s plan to adopt Apple Pay as well. Apple Inc is helping quick-service restaurants like KFC, which “have a need for fast payments,” Bailey said.
The adoption of Apple Pay by the restaurant chains is the latest sign of the growth of the mobile payments system, which has been gaining partners as diverse as JetBlue and Rite Aid. Some of the retailers that use Apple Pay had earlier declined to work with the system.
Apple introduced Apple Pay in September last year. The system lets users pay for goods by holding their iPhone or Apple Watch near a credit card reader. Apple Pay works with the credit, debit, store and loyalty cards that users have stored in their Passbook app.
In a statement, Starbucks said it would test Apple in some stores by year’s end before rolling the service out next year in 7,500 stores.
“We have been accepting Apple Pay in the UK over the past few months, and it has been received well by customers,” Starbucks said.
Even though Apple Pay is still a tiny portion of Apple’s overall revenue stream, Bailey said that she had seen “a sea change in acceptance at the merchant level,” emphasizing that more businesses, including small and midsize ones, are adopting the technology necessary to accept payment methods like Apple Pay.
Whether Apple can use mobile payments to lock people into its product ecosystem remains to be seen. The number of people who use devices for mobile payments is growing fast, but it is still tiny.
Research firm EMarketer said that there were 15.9 million mobile payment users in the US last year and that it expected that number to jump by 42 percent, to 22.6 million, this year.
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