UK-based Lloyds Banking Group has finally enabled Apple Pay for its customers. That means Halifax, Lloyds Bank, and Bank of Scotland customers are now able to use Apple’s mPayment service via their iPhones and Apple Watches.
It’s incremental progress for the mPayment service, which launched in the UK in mid-July and has since suffered from a bit of foot-dragging from partner financial institutions in rolling it out to their customers. The Lloyds activation comes on the heels of a bump up for the spending limit on Apple Pay purchases, as determined by the UK Cards Association, at the start of this month. Meanwhile, Barclays, the other major UK bank that has been slow to come around to Apple Pay, insists that the service’s launch is forthcoming.
According to The Telegraph, a recent market research report indicated that 80 percent of Apple Watch owners, both in the UK and the US, were already Apple Pay users, with most of those not using it reporting that is was mainly because their banks didn’t support it. So it’s good news for Apple as more financial institutions get on board in the UK, though of course banks in other countries, such as Australia, are continuing to put up resistance. Still, Apple Pay is slowly but surely continuing its march onto the market, and as other mPayment services like Android Pay and Samsung Pay start to push for their own slice of the pie, it appears almost inevitable that the major banks will simply have to adapt to the new reality of mPayments.
Source: The Telegraph
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