Apple Pay Coming to Orange Cash Customers in France

Following up on Federighi’s announcement that Apple Pay is heading into France within the next few months, the country’s major wireless carrier, Orange, made a major announcement today: It is bringing Orange Cash customers Apple Pay.

Orange Cash is an NFC SIM-based mobile payments service offered by the carrier but so far limited to Android smartphones. According to Orange, more than 200,000 Orange customers have used Orange Cash.

iPhone users of Orange Cash can download the app to their device, create an account, and activate the mobile payment function with Apple Pay directly from within the Orange cash app. It doesn’t matter who they bank with, as long as they are locked into the Orange network.

With Orange Cash on the iPhone, card numbers stored neither on the handset nor Apple servers. Instead, a unique Device Account Number is assigned, encrypted, and securely stored in the Secure Element of your device. The same thing happens when a user adds credit or debit card information to Apple Pay. This is a tokenized version of the card, and this is also the case with the Orange Cash account. The press release doesn’t mention the need for an NFC SIM or a launch data, so we’ve reached out to Orange and will update the article as soon as we hear back.

Orange Cash is accepted at 400,000 points of sale across France.