It’s been 10 years since Apple Pay was born. Apple ID is just the beginning.

Apple Pay is celebrating its 10th anniversary since its launch to U.S. consumers on October 20, 2014. The way we pay has changed a lot over the past decade, and contactless payments, with or without Apple Wallet, are a game-changer. But over the next decade, Apple Wallet will change everything.

Apple Pay was inevitable in a sense.

When I first downloaded ApplePay and went to London to try it out, paying by phone was already outdated. I have been making payments using my phone for quite some time because my phone has a contactless sticker that contains an EMV chip with an RFID antenna. I love that sticker, it has a Barclaycard token in it, and I used it all the time. And it wasn’t the first one I had. I had a prepaid EMV sticker for a few years before that.

(I had a contactless EMV watch long before I got an Apple Watch, but since I don’t usually wear a watch at all, I preferred the stickers.)

I believe the stickers will never work together to make NFC payments work properly, even though it was clear from the early days that consumers would be allowed to make payments. I stumped everyone by saying it was going to be the future of payments. With their cell phones, it would be absolutely huge.

By the way, I’m not saying this with perfect hindsight. In the early days of mobile commerce, and long before we saw how M-PESA transformed Kenyan society, when we first saw someone using SMS to buy a can of Coke from a vending machine. , I was completely convinced that mobile payments were the future. financial system.

By the way, I wasn’t the only one who thought this. Far from it. In 2008, Sophie Tacchi argued that while banks were exploring “niche” payment services (such as SMS bill payments and retail transaction confirmations), the introduction of contactless proximity communications was secure transaction device Provide payment, coupon, ticketing, and other services. She correctly predicted that European consumers would quickly adopt such services and that this would be a great opportunity for banks to develop new value-added services. This is because banks will face new competitors and use these new technologies to provide payments and other services. Transaction services that “disadvantage” retail banking payment services.

She talked about the possibility of banks and telecommunications companies working together. My prediction that banks and telcos would not be able to cooperate was correct, but it wasn’t really a prediction because I had already worked as a consultant on several projects where banks and telcos were trying to cooperate. After all, mobile carriers, banks, and retailers could have worked together to build a ubiquitous mobile payments infrastructure a decade before Apple Pay launched, but they can’t work together. It was.

In fact, Stephen Bass, writing at the launch of Apple Pay, said that since the early 2000s contactless (i.e. near field communication, NFC) has been the preferred choice of technology to capture the mobile payments industry. I pointed out that it was recognized. There is a battle brewing between banks and mobile phone operators over who is who.effectively owned”The consumer has brought nothing but delay. They all wanted to be in charge, but none of them ended up in charge while Apple assembled its consumer-focused vision.

The rest, as they say, is history. Apple Pay is currently available in 76 markets, with recent additions to Chile, South Korea, and Vietnam. It has over 11,000 banks (approximately 3,000 in Europe) and currently supports 20 payment networks worldwide. And they continue to evolve. For example, customers can now checkout using: Apple Pay in third-party web browsersa feature that was previously limited to Safari.

Identity is new…everything

Jennifer Bailey, Apple’s vice president of Apple Pay and Apple Wallet, spoke about what’s next for Apple Pay.beyond payment” aims to replace your physical wallet with a secure, private, and convenient digital wallet that lets you manage everything from event tickets and keys to government IDs and transit passes. Nine US states have already issued mobile driver licenses (mDLs) that can be stored in Apple or Android wallets, and as New York DMV Commissioner Mark JF Schroeder notes, these digital credentials The information isThe future of identity verificationIt gives citizens control over what personal data is shared and is far preferable to a physical document that exposes all personal information. The ISO mDL standard is used not only in the United States, but also in Australia, to name a few.

Car keys are a particularly interesting use case highlighted by Bailey. He said car keys could someday become keys. Contactless rental car. Keyless car unlocking is a mainstream use case that Apple has already patented. In fact, Apple is a charter member of the Car Connectivity Consortium, which created the Digital Key Release 1.0 specification in 2018, and is working with more than 30 automakers around the world to enroll digital car keys in Apple Wallet. .

I think this vision of the future will change the world even more than Apple Pay. The lack of digital identity infrastructure is a major impediment to the evolution of online services, and someone has to do something about it. If that someone was Apple, that could be a huge deal..

Bailey said she can’t wait to see what the next 10 years have in store, and frankly, I can’t either. We are leaving the era of Apple Pay and entering the era of Apple ID. I’m excited.