Apple Insider
Apple CEO Tim Cook on an earnings call Thursday said the coronavirus gave Apple Pay and other contactless solutions a boost, adding that the pandemic fundamentally changes consumers’ approach to payments.
During Apple’s fourth quarter earnings call, Cook touted financial success built on double-digit gains in every major hardware category except for iPhone. Cook also praised the company’s digital services, a category that includes payment products like Apple Pay and Apple Card.
“We continue to be very enthusiastic about the whole payment services area,” Cook said. “Apple Card is is doing well and Apple Pay is doing exceptionally well, as you can imagine in this environment people are less [willing] to hand over a card.”
Apple does not view the change as temporary.
“This contactless payment has taken on a different level of adoption. And that I think we’ll never go back,” Cook said on the call. “The U.S. has been lagging a bit in contactless payment and I think that the pandemic may well [have] put the U.S. on a different trajectory there and so we are very bullish about this area, and view that there there are more things that Apple can do in this space. And, and so it’s an area of great interest to us.”
Looking for information about how COVID-19 has impacted the payments industry?
The Strawhecker Group (TSG) and Visa Consulting & Analytics (VCA) teamed up to survey a representative sample of U.S. consumers, and analyzed Visa’s proprietary spend data, with the goal of understanding how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted consumer lifestyles, payments trends, and how behaviors may change after the pandemic.
Click here to download TSG and Visa’s infographic, Purchasing in a Pandemic.