Retail giant Home Depot is looking to offer Apple Pay, Apple's mobile payment platform, as an option in over 2,000 of the company's stores.
According to Bloomberg, this would make Home Depot the largest retailer to become a partner of Apple for Apple Pay, further expanding the reach of the mobile payment platform.
Steve Holmes, a spokesman for Home Depot, said offering Apple Pay in its stores is something that the retail giant would like to be able to do, but there is no deal in place yet with Apple to finalize the groundbreaking arrangement.
Home Depot, the largest home improvement retail store in the world, currently accepts online payment portal PayPal as a payment option in its stores, with the company looking to add more kinds of mobile payment alternatives to its roster.
Customers were already able to utilize Apple Pay in some of the stores of Home Depot, despite no agreement being finalized between the company and Apple. Apple Pay was accepted in these certain stores because near-field communication (NFC) readers were installed in checkout terminals, allowing use of Apple's mobile payment platform.
The NFC readers have now been disabled in Home Depot stores for the previous few weeks as there is an ongoing upgrade of the company's point-of-sale systems, according to Holmes. This has resulted in several inaccurate news reports that Home Depot has decided to drop support for Apple Pay, when there has been no official partnership yet to begin with.
If Home Depot decides to pursue its plan to sign up with Apple for Apple Pay, the retail giant will be joining chain stores, such as Whole Foods Market and Macy's, as partners for Apple with the implementation of Apple Pay systems in stores.
Many other retail companies, on the other hand, are waiting for the CurrentC mobile payment platform that is currently being developed by Merchant Customer Exchange. The MCE was founded three years ago by companies including Walmart and Target.
Bloomberg added that Apple is banking on Apple Pay to help the company in expanding into new services. The largest banks in the United States and credit card networks, meanwhile, are looking at Apple Pay as a means to hasten the adoption of mobile payments in the U.S.
At stake in Apple's expansion of its Apple Pay platform is an industry that could process sales worth as much as $67 billion in 2015, according to information from Forrester Research.
