April 26, 2024

Apple Pay available in the UK. Will it threaten Polish Payments Standard?

Poland is not a priority market for Apple. iOS has – depending on the research – from 5 to 10 percent. share in mobile operating systems in Poland. Additionally, Apple Pay is only available on 3 devices: iPhone’The 6, 6 Plus and Apple Watch, on whichóhe premiere of which is still awaited in Poland. This significantly limits the reach. Although Poles are rapidly changing their payment preferences, of which contactless card payments are an excellent example, a limited group of onlineóApple’s solutions may not be enough for it to enter into talks with banks in Poland. Especially since, from a business perspective, this will not be an easy negotiation, given the constraints of interchange rates.

In addition, domestic solutions such as BLIK indicate that banks in Poland are innovative enough to create benchmarks on their own, without waiting for mobile movements of technological giantsów. The PSP solution has the advantage of being massive – device- and operating system-independent, available in banking applications already used by customersóand the banks themselves are watching over its popularization. Admittedly, BLIK is still far from Apple’s user experience in POS, but works on BLIK contactless payments are in progress, which will certainly affect faster adoption of this form of payment.

We, at Bank Zachodni WBK, bet on innovation, as proven by our 3. place in Forrester report „2015 Global Mobile Functionality Benchmark”, i already screwedóWe will make contactless payments based on HCE technology available in Poland. Android users with NFC will be pleased, especially sinceól put a lot of emphasis on UX. Android users are the vast majority of our mobile usersów. I can predict that by the time Apple Pay arrives in Poland, mobile payments will have already moved from a stage „early adopters” to „early majority”. We will have in this swój share.