Desjardins Emphasizes Security, Inevitability in Announcing Apple Pay Support

Canadian financial services institution Desjardins Group has announced its support for Apple Pay.

In a statement announcing its support for Apple’s mobile payment platform, the bank placed a particular emphasis on its security, noting that customers’ “actual card numbers are not stored on the device, nor on Apple servers,” but are instead encrypted into a code stored on the iPhone’s embedded Secure Element. In the wake of Yahoo’s major hack announcement, the bank may have seen a strong need to reassure new users about Apple Pay’s security.

Desjardins EVP André Chatelain also suggested that the bank’s embrace of the system was inevitable. “Today, smartphones are basically indispensable and demand for mobile services—mobile payment in particular—is only going to grow,” he said. Recent market research backs that up.

Desjardins’ support adds some further bulk to Apple Pay’s support in Canada, whose biggest banks have all signed on since the service made its domestic debut last autumn.