Banks and Credit Unions to Team Up Against Apple Pay Fees

Banks and Credit Unions to Team Up Against Apple Pay Fees macrumors.com

An antitrust lawsuit accusing Apple of blocking tap-to-pay competition is moving forward and will see banks and credit unions able to band together to sue Apple. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White this week certified a…

126 points•Brajeshwar•4 days ago•133 comments•

#apple #banks #credit #pay #unions #credit unions #fees #team

133 comments

havaloc4 days ago

I get why the banks are not happy, but I can tell them that I am not going to use Chase Wallet, Bank of America Wallet, Citi Wallet...just pay the fee and be thankful for the reduced payment friction, which they invariably make money from. PS: Nobody is going to use Paze (yet another half baked wallet), other than to collect the free $10 to sign up for it.

Somewhat related, even Walmart relented and now supports Apple Pay/Contactless. Every big merchant has now relented (Kroger, Home Depot, Walmart).

radialstub4 days ago

This is the government's problem. I tend to be on the side of less government, but it is so obvious that payment facilitation should be a service provided by the government. The government is just allowing corporations to collect rents, because they are lazy and incompetent.

bnjms4 days ago

They’re more like taxes than rents. It’s a constant cost applied to all goods because of the ubiquity of use means we pay with or without playing the credit card/payments game.

guywithahat4 days ago

It's not a government problem, it's a competition problem. Fundamentally 1-3% is actually a very competitive rate for organizing the easy transfer of money and handling fraud. Merchants would rather the cost be free, and banks may want a larger slice of the pie, but until someone comes up with a better way of paying money for both sides this is the best we have. If government got involved all that could happen is fees would increase and then we'd miss out on future efficiency improvements and savings.

AnthonyMouse4 days ago

This is fundamentally looking at it the wrong way.

Why do we need my bank to send money to your bank via Visa or the Federal Reserve or any such thing, instead of having my bank send money directly to your bank? All they need to do is both support the same openly specified protocol for transferring money.

syvolt4 days ago

Or Apple Pay can just be like Google Wallet is on Android? The alternative is not multiple apps.

shreddit4 days ago

There is already apple wallet where i can put any of my banking cards…

add-sub-mul-div4 days ago

Another alternative (in the US, at least) is tapping a piece of plastic instead of your phone and not inviting any of the tech giants into your transactions at all. What an unforced error, to shovel more of your data at them needlessly.

kelvinjps104 days ago

I have used both but I dont know the difference

juiceland4 days ago

How does it work on Google Wallet?

wmf4 days ago

A possible compromise is to allow Apple Pay to be a monopoly as long as it doesn't charge any fees.

braiamp4 days ago

How about I do you one better compromise: create a payment network that don't rely on private institutions rent seeking behavior, like Pix in Brazil.

kotaKat4 days ago

Walmart only relented because they finally broke through the final missing link of the contactless issue. They got customers conned into giving their phone numbers at checkout, just like it's the grocery store.

Cards get linked to accounts automatically behind the scenes based on first6/last4 card number tracking, then everyone else self-selects to punch their phone number on the screen.

Same reason Walmart Radio is such gruesome auditory cancer, it's part of the data collection and advertising vehicle.

havaloc4 days ago

That could be part of the reason, but also I think insisting on chip all this time just really slows down a store that doesn't really spend on cashiering all that much. Tap to pay can shave off a few seconds on every transaction (ever been behind someone in the store who finally pulls out their wallet, finds the business end of their card, inserts it, waits 20 seconds...).

Millions of transactions a day, over thousands of stores, it can make a huge difference in time saved.

caycep4 days ago

granted i am a bit of schadenfreude at the thought of poor poor megabanks having to pay....fees...

otterley4 days ago

Ultimately it comes out of their customers’ wallets.

ksec4 days ago

It is estimated Apple Pay does anywhere between $5T to $10T transaction per year. That is everything from Credit Card to Debit Card. If we average out at 0.1% per transaction over $5T, that is $5B per year.

The transaction itself doesn't touch any Apple severs. In case anyone is wondering if there is an operational cost. There is a set up cost though with the initial verification and sometimes Apple do charge a one time fee per card set up.

There is a privacy angle with using Apple Pay. But I am unsure how much info banks and network is not getting because of it.

MBCook4 days ago

Retailers may get less than using their own app, but I agree I don’t really see how it affects the processors or the banks.

However Apple is providing something in all this. Apple Pay requires biometrics which (in theory) should help lower fraud costs for everyone. So it’s not like they’re just rent seeking for nothing.

I don’t know how it went for everyone else, but I don’t remember tapped pay getting popular until after Apple Pay and Apple pushing it. I know that coincided with when EMV terminals really started to get popular because the credit card companies were forcing it. But I honestly wonder if they helped push it to the mainstream, even for people just using tap cards.

gucci-on-fleek4 days ago

> but I don’t remember tapped pay getting popular until after Apple Pay and Apple pushing it

It's regional—tap with cards was fairly popular in Canada before Apple Pay came along, but every time I visited the US I remember being surprised at how many retailers supported only the magnetic stripe.

Cider99864 days ago

I hope we get tap to pay on GrapheneOS in the US soon. You can already use it in the EU with Curve and PayPal. It's a blocker for a lot of people.

Hacker News seems generally not interested in private payments or how terrible the banking system is, which is disappointing.

https://eylenburg.github.io/payments.htm

1d22a4 days ago

I'm already able to use tap to pay on GrapheneOS, just only with banking apps which use Android Pay, rather than Google Wallet.

Cider99863 days ago

Yes, those as well. But I think only a few European banks have that.

Andromxda3 days ago

Klarna has NFC tap to pay in their app too. Not sure if it works outside Europe though.

theNotFractured4 days ago

There's walt, which will be launching soon.

https://walt.is/

theNotFractured4 days ago

Dunno if my comment updated, but it's actually walt.

https://walt.is/

gchamonlive4 days ago

Pix and the other variants are the way to go for money transfer, it's just that these monopolies won't be happy to forfeit their easy money, both credit, banks as well as Apple. They are all fighting for monopolies, they must cease to exist for the good of the common folk.

KellyCriterion4 days ago

Well, fortunately Pix is statedriven/stateenforced/strateregulated, so it contains some of the most important ingredients to become some type of standard - the only reason why Mastercard et.al. are so powerful is because this area/field of tech was long no recognised as critical/relevant enough.

Pix is doing exactly the right thing, as ECB/SEPA is as well.

gchamonlive4 days ago

Totally, and hopefully if standardisation isn't possible that we will at least see some form of integration between these systems, even if under an international transaction fee.

freehorse4 days ago

> Apple has changed its policies since the lawsuit was filed. As of iOS 18.1, developers are able to offer NFC contactless payments in their apps.

The lawsuit was files in 2022, and apple opened access to the NFC chip in 2024 (iOS 18.1). Searching I could find alternative wallet apps that offer contactless payments, but only in EEA, eg [0, 1, 2]. It is supposed to be accessible in the US, but I am not sure why there are no apps there, unless I have missed them.

IANAL but if access to NFC is open since 2024 and (assumingly) the amount banks etc pay for apple pay has not really decreased, wouldn't that mean that their main argument is not really substantive?

[0] paypal @germany https://www.macrumors.com/2025/05/13/paypal-contactless-paym...

[1] curve pay @eu(?) https://www.macrumors.com/2025/05/23/curve-pay-launches-ipho...

[2] Vipps mobilepay @norway https://vippsmobilepay.com/en-NO/news/2024/12/09/vippsmobile...

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