Banco Santander Brings Apple Pay Home for the Holidays

Banco Santander has now enabled Apple Pay support in Spain. In so doing, it holds claim to being the first Spanish financial institution to offer Apple’s mPayment platform.

It actually enabled Apple Pay in the UK last year, and offered support to rival mPayment platform Android Pay toward the end of this past summer. It isn’t clear why the bank was so delayed in bringing Apple Pay support to its home country, but in a statement announcing the move, Santander Spain head Rami Aboukhair said the support “shows we are committed to collaborate and to bring innovation and new technology to our customers to make their payments easier, faster and more secure.”

The bank says that the service should be accepted in about 75 percent of Spain’s retail stores, with customers currently able to upload their Mastercard payment cards to the platform. The move should help Apple to get a little boost from its fees as the holiday shopping season kicks off, and may help Santander to see more transactions too.