To filed under “Not a Surprise,” Bloomberg, citing “three people with knowledge of the arrangement,” reported today that Apple will get a cut of the action when iPhone users use their device to pay for purchases via Apple Pay in place of swiping their credit or debit cards.
Under deals reached with banks individually, Cupertino, California-based Apple will collect a fee for each transaction, said one of the people, who requested anonymity because terms aren’t public. While that gives the tech company a share of the more than $40 billion that banks generate annually from so-called swipe fees, lenders expect to benefit as consumers spend more of their money via mobile phones and other digital devices, the person said.
Apple unveiled their Apple Pay electronic payments service at their big event on Tuesday. The service allows users to store credit cards in the Passbook app on their iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus, and allows them to pay for goods or services with a tap of their finger on the device’s Touch ID sensor.
The mobile payments market is expected to more than quadruple to about $90 billion by 2017, says Forrester Research. Bloomberg’s sources didn’t specify the size of the fee that Apple would receive, noting that it could vary with the size of the purchase.
Currently, merchants typically pay fees totaling around 2% of the purchase price for credit cared transactions.
