Apple Pay comes to UK next month
Apple Pay will be available in the UK from next month, with eight of the UK’s most established banks and the major credit and debit card networks supporting it – along with Transport for London.
Apple Pay will support UK credit and debit cards from American Express, MasterCard and Visa Europe, issued by First Direct, HSBC, NatWest, Nationwide Building Society, Royal Bank of Scotland, Santander and Ulster Bank. Other issuing banks will follow in the autumn, including Bank of Scotland, Coutts, Halifax, Lloyds, MBNA, M&S Bank and TSB.
Apple also announced support from a range of UK retailers including Boots, BP, Costa Coffee, Dune, JD Sports, KFC, Liberty, LIDL, Marks & Spencer, McDonald’s, Nando’s, New Look, Post Office, Pret A Manger, Spar, Starbucks, Subway, Wagamama and Waitrose.
Apps that will accept Apple Pay in the UK include Addison Lee, Airbnb, Argos, Booking.com, British Airways, Domino’s, easyJet, Hailo, HotelTonight, hungryhouse, JD Sports, Just Eat, lastminute.com, Miss Selfridge, Ocado, Stubhub, thetrainline.com, Top 10, Topshop, Uncover, Vueling, YPlan, Zalando and Zara, among others. When paying for goods and services within apps,
Jeremy Nicholds, executive director of mobile at Visa Europe, said: “Contactless payments are already widely embraced by millions of Visa cardholders across the country every day, so adding the simplicity and convenience of Apple Pay will catapult mobile payments into the mainstream. If people leave the house with one item, it’s their mobile phone – we’ve worked alongside Apple and the various banks involved to give customers a really seamless and exciting new payment experience through Apple Pay, so they have new ways to use their favourite Visa cards on the go and when shopping in the apps they love.”
Mark Barnett, president of MasterCard UK & Ireland said that uptake of contactless payments in the UK has been strong: “Britons have rapidly adopted tap and pay behaviour. In the UK, we make more than 10 contactless payments every second, and on Transport for London alone, commuters tap to pay over one million times a day.”
While Apple has not said anything about further country roll-outs, Visa Europe confirmed that UK-registered Apple Pay users will be able to use any NFC-enabled contactless point-of-sale terminal, of which there are 400,000 in the UK and 2.6 million across Europe.
