Apple Reportedly Gearing Up ‘iWallet’ Plans, Could Possibly Launch This Fall

‘EasyPay’ concept by Ricardo Del Toro

Can we expect some sort of mobile payments to launch this fall from Apple? Payment-industry executives tell The Information this could be possible, as this said wallet would let people pay for items with their iPhone:

Conversations between Apple and payments-industry companies have heated up in recent months, with several people briefed on the talks saying that Apple executives have discussed launching a mobile “wallet” as soon as this fall for people to use their iPhones to pay for goods in physical stores.

Apple’s mobile wallet plans are apparently coming into ‘greater focus’ and the sources say a secure element on the iPhone would store payment credentials, which we would suspect to be similar to the secure enclave in the A7 chip which stores Touch ID credentials (maybe they’d be stored in the same enclave?):

Apple has told some partners its system would involve a so-called secured element in the phones—a piece of hardware where sensitive information such as a phone owner’s financial credentials can be stored. The company also aims to run the system without giving up any control to wireless carriers.

Again, this would be a mobile payments solution run by Apple and not wireless carriers, which is currently what is place from carriers such as the Big 3.

Back in January the Wall Street Journal reported Apple was planning an iTunes Account-based mobile payment service, while later in May Re/code said Apple was interviewing senior payments industry executives to help launch a mobile payments plan. Other rumours previously pointed to Apple possibly integrating NFC into the next iPhone 6 for mobile payments.

Apple has 800 million iTunes accounts with credit cards on file and if you take into consideration Touch ID as a way to securely authenticate payments, we could be onto something special here. There hasn’t been a successful mobile wallet that has taken off, so Apple has time here to perfect its solution.