Reactionary damage control and hypocritical double-speak.
It’s becoming all too clear this consortium was caught flatfooted by Apple Pay. They’ve been working on this mobile pay “solution” for 4 years but haven’t had anything to actually show for it yet.
Obviously, their merchants can control what forms of payments they want to accept at point-of-sale. And some member merchants decided to shut off those terminals to prevent Apple Pay from being used (meaning it also locks out Google Wallet).
But that particular move isn’t about giving the customer choice. It’s more on the lines of a stall tactic since they don’t want to give Apple Pay any sort of traction until they have their own solution deployed. The hypocrisy is outstanding; MCX’s COO states that one of the key rationale for their solution is accessibility; Apple Pay (and by extension, NFC payments) is only available for iPhone 6 and 6 Plus owners. The MCX president is even worse; stating there needs to several strong (mobile pay) players. They claim there are no penalties regarding the exclusivity issue; then how are they going to enforce it?
MCX as they state is usable on more devices since it isn’t tied to NFC. Yet, rather than giving consumers that choice now, MCX’s rationale (or at least with some of its members), is to not allow iPhone 6 and 6 Plus users ability to use those terminals until CurrentC is functioning and the exclusivity period (measured in “months”) has ended.
And there is that before mentioned damning statement made by Wal-mart’s former CEO. Like I mentioned, the above series of PR is damage control for what is likely going to be a half-ass mobile pay solution that won’t do anything well at all.
