Apple’s big media event is underway and the company has just announced its hugely ambitious project to kill off the wallet. Although Google has tried to do this in the past with its Google Wallet app, Apple is going to try to take advantage of its hundreds of millions of iTunes accounts to get the job done. The new service will be called Apple Pay and it aims to take all of the pain points from having multiple credit cards and identification cards in our wallets.
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As expected, Apple Pay will take advantage of NFC capabilities on the iPhone 6 to help enable mobile payments. Apple says that Apple Pay stores information securely through encryption and will integrate with the Apple Passbook application. The app will support credit cards from MasterCard, Visa and American Express at launch and will also be supported by the six largest American banks. Apple has also worked out deals to get Apple Pay supported at more than 220,000 retail outlets at its launch.
Apple also took some not-so-subtle digs at Google by emphasizing that it doesn’t collect user data and financial data from customers. Furthermore, it says that “Apple doesn’t know what you bought, where you bought it, or how much you paid for it” when you use Apple Pay.
