The new mobile payments system of Apple will include CVS and Walgreens as partners, according to new reports
CVS and Walgreens, the two biggest pharmacy chains in the United States with a combined number of 15,000 stores, will provide an outright credibility and viability to the payment system that Apple is expected to unveil in its Sept. 9 media event.
In addition to the credibility and viability that having the two pharmacy companies onboard the payment system will provide, the nature of the stores will also lead to a high frequency of usage for the Apple mobile payments system.
Because customers usually buy from CVS and Walgreens weekly, with some customers buying even daily, the users will be able to quickly get accustomed to using the new system.
Apple's new mobile payment system is widely expected to allow users to simply tap or wave their smartphones in the checkout terminals of partner establishments to pay for their purchases. The system will partly use near field communication, or NFC, wireless technology, which the iPhone 6 is expected to support.
Apple, however, may be using additional technologies in partnership with or to replace NFC though. The new system may also include the fingerprint identification technology found in the iPhone 5S to authenticate the payments.
Representatives from the two pharmacy companies refused to comment on the report.
"We don't know what Apple may be planning in terms of a payment system so it is not possible for us to say whether it is something our stores may be able to accept," said Mike DeAngelis, a spokesman for CVS.
Payments may soon become an important source of revenue for Apple, but there are still some challenges that the company needs to hurdle before raking in the profits. First and foremost is that paying for purchases using cash or credit cards is not really hard to do, with previous iterations of mobile payment systems not really providing enough value so that consumers will change their payment preferences.
In addition, users may be questioning the security of Apple, after a hacker was able to extract nude images of celebrities that had their iCloud accounts compromised.
Executives and analysts, however, believe that Apple can overcome these challenges. One reason for this is that Apple is the creator of both the device and the operating system, so the mobile payment technology can;t be blocked by wireless service providers such as what they did with Google Wallet. If the providers wan't to ban Apple's mobile payment system, they would have to stop selling iPhones, which is surely one thing that would never happen.
