Payments solution provider Elavon, a subsidiary of U.S. Bancorp., has announced the launch of support for Apple Pay and AMEX cardholders for Canadian businesses.
Mia Huntington, Vice President of Elavon in Canada, said in a statement “Along with the increasing consumer demand for contactless payments, Elavon and Apple Pay enable businesses to offer the convenience their customers expect through their preferred method of payment including their iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch.”
Elavon has over 1.3 million customers in Canada, the U.S., Europe, Mexico, Brazil and Puerto Rico.
Canadian payments processor and supporter of Apple Pay, Moneris, previously noted while some merchants accept American Express, tap-to-pay for the latter is turned off by default, which means businesses require calling in to enable it for Apple Pay. Moneris explained “It’s not a default feature as not all merchants want the capability.”
How are you finding Apple Pay so far in Canada?
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Apply pay in Canada has been a rough go to date. Works great at a couple places but in general it’s not supported, doesn’t always work where it should and merchants barely know if they take Amex contactless payments. Hope it gets better
Agreed – some merchants have tap and accept AMEX; but their merchants wrongly assume they accept Tap for AMEX (Which they quite often don’t). Most of the time, I end up holding up the line, as I then have to take out my physical MasterCard when Tap does’t work.
When it does work, however, it works great.
Yeah.. when it works it’s glorious. I hope there’s an algorithm at TD that’s wondering why I’ve stopped spending all that money on their VISA.
That’s been my experience so far as well. Been using it since day 1 and it’s great when it works (with the Watch). Way too many places don’t accept Amex, however, which forces me to fall back to my debit card.
So far it’s worked at a number of places (chains mostly: McDonald’s, Tim Hortons, Jean-Coutu, etc.) but gas stations have been frustrating – most of the ones I went to don’t have tap enabled on their pumps and one only supported Visa/MC taps.
Also, it sometimes takes two attempts for the terminal to recognize the watch (not sure if that’s specific to the clunky device at my local McDonald’s) – and when it doesn’t work, you look like an idiot…
I like the cash back on the Amex (and they’ve had Esso & Amazon cash back promotions which were nice) but they need to find a way to get into more locations.
Apple Pay in Canada works great!
…
(I’m from the future, the wayyyyy off & distant future in fact it’s a galaxy far,far away.)
Appreciate the knowledge from the future ? 🙂
So disappointed in the Canadian banks. I’m going to go the full 2 year contract on this phone without being able to use its tent pole feature because of how anti-customer the Canadian banks are 🙁
It works great when it work
But unfortunately sometimes it doesn’t work wher its supposed to work
Works for most of my day-to-day purchases:
7-Eleven
Shopper’s Drug Mart
London Drugs
Co-op
Community Natural Foods
And my random one-off purchase at Long and McQuade.
Where it doesn’t work (and I no longer expect it to) is at restaurants, mostly because they want you to tip and you can’t tip via Apple Pay, unfortunately.
Most terminals will ask for the tip amount or percentage before the card gets inserted (or tapped). This shouldn’t be an issue.