Braintree Adds Apple Pay and Android Pay in Australia
Customers can now use Apple Pay and Android Pay to pay through PayPal’s (NASDAQ: PYPL) Braintree retail platform in Australia.
An upgrade to Braintree allows customers to access Visa, MasterCard, and American Express balances via Android Pay or Apple at participating merchants, Business Insider Australia reported. A fast-food operation called Guzman y Gomez will be one of the first brick and mortar shops to accept mobile app payment via PayPal.
Apple Pay is being integrated first at Guzman y Gomez but Android Pay will surely follow. Customers can apparently access PayPal balances through Braintree in Australia.
Australians are not the only ones with new options on Android Pay. Americans can access 17 new financial institutions new via the Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) solution, Android Police reported. Unfortunately, almost all the new institutions appear to be smaller credit unions and small town banks.
Big Retail still says no to Android Pay and Apple Pay
Like Apple Pay, Android Pay still has not cracked the hardest barrier of all big U.S. retailers.
Almost no major U.S. retail brands appear in the Where to Use Android Pay page at the app’s website. Such behemoths as Walmart, Amazon, Kroger, Home Depot, Lowes, CVS, Burger King, Safeway, and Target are conspicuously absent from the list. The same sorry situation is repeated at Apple Pay, where almost all the big names in U.S. retail are conspicuously absent.
It is unclear when this will change but it appears that companies like Walmart and Kroger (NYSE: KR); America’s two largest grocers with 27% of the business between them are in no hurry to adopt these apps. This will probably remain the biggest obstacle to payment apps’ expansion.
Why Walmart and Kroger are saying No to Apple Pay and Android Pay
It also creates an opening for QR (quick read) code payment apps such as Walmart Pay, Chase Pay, and Alipay – some of which Walmart (NYSE: WMT) will accept. My guess is that Walmart is trying to force Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) to add QR Code to their mobile wallets.
Apple Pay and Android Pay use Near Field Communications (NFC) to communicate with cash registers which might be less secure than QR Code. NFC uses a wireless signal to communicate with cash registers; while QR Code uses a scan of a barcode to initiate a transaction, which might be harder to hack.
It looks as if payment platforms like Braintree might be the real future for apps like Android Pay.
