Apple Pay Rival ‘CurrentC’ Expected to Hit Stores Next Month

CurrentC

Apple Pay’s upcoming rival ‘CurrentC’, a mobile payment service developed by Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) group which includes retail giants Walmart, Best Buy, Target, 7-11 and more, is finally ready to go live after three years of development and is expected to hit the stores next month, Bloomberg reports. The source claims that the CurrentC mobile app has been tested by employees of the retailers and will get a limited trial run next month in stores.

That means shoppers will soon be able to use the technology, called CurrentC, to pay for items with their phones. Customers also will need assurances that the technology is safe, given the high-profile data breaches at retailers over the past few years, said Julie Conroy, a payments security analyst at Aite Group. CurrentC itself was hacked last year during an early test.

“Trust is going to be a huge issue for them,” Conroy said.

MCX group claims that its retail member network spanning 110,000 locations, is set to accept payments via the company’s mobile payment app, which utilizes scanning a QR code off a customer’s smartphone. By creating their own mobile payment network, CurrentC aims to data mine customer shopping habits, something Apple Pay doesn’t do.

Earlier this year, Best Buy and Discover, both of which have been big supporters of CurrentC, started accepting Apple Pay, causing a significant blow to the yet to be released mobile payment system.

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