Apple Pay Launches in Israel

Should be made clear: Apple Pay always worked in Israel (it always worked anywhere that had contactless debit or credit cards). What's new is that it works if you have a card issued in Israel by an Israeli bank. So it always worked for Americans, Brits etc. travelling to Israel.

It's crazy it took this long.

If you are a bank in Israel, it doesn't give you any competitive advantage to support Apple Pay. Until the first bank in the country adopts it. Then you are in danger of losing customers to that bank, so suddenly all the other banks are keen to support ApplePay as well. Apple has to convince ONE bank in a country.

It's crazy it took this long.

Should be made clear: Apple Pay always worked in Israel (it always worked anywhere that had contactless debit or credit cards). What's new is that it works if you have a card issued in Israel by an Israeli bank. So it always worked for Americans, Brits etc. travelling to Israel.

If you are a bank in Israel, it doesn't give you any competitive advantage to support Apple Pay. Until the first bank in the country adopts it. Then you are in danger of losing customers to that bank, so suddenly all the other banks are keen to support ApplePay as well. Apple has to convince ONE bank in a country.

This was not about banks supporting it at all.

Israel had two problems. One is standard for payments which was using a local design that was not supporting international contactless payment until last year (Apple Pay support only started last year in Israel when they finally officially supported EMV, not ever, don’t make stuff up), and second is the availability of contactless points in businesses which also only started to be common last year.

then they needed to support apple system which required the regulate body to approve which also took time because of the mess politically they are.
That also took until mid last year.

then, when all that hurdle was done, they were able to release support. The regulator said they can release support now, and they all worked to make it work at the same time.

israel banks and credit companies wanted to support it since 2017 but the regulator did not approve.

That was quick!

The problem was not in Apple or the banks but rather in the very ancient credit card infrastructure in vast majority of shops

No, that’s not the problem either. If Apple were looking at retailer infrastructure, the USA wouldn’t have been the first country in the world to have apple pay (only 3% of retailers had the necessary equipment there back in 2014).

As I’ve learned overtime the greatest hurdle for apple pay is the archaic way of processing card payments in most countries: they have only one or two local companies that act as switches to process payments. Since they usually can’t handle the tokens generated by Apple Pay, that makes it impossible to implement apple pay with locally issued bank cards until Visa and Mastercard are allowed to operate as local switches too. That’s why Apple Pay took so long to arrive to countries in Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa and, I bet, Israel too.

But wait, haven’t there always been online banks that support Apple Pay? And banks that support Apple Pay have branches all around the world, I imagine...so hasn’t the competition you’re talking about existed as long as Apple Pay has existed?

No. Even though banks operate with the same name in many countries, they still operate as if they were different companies. Example: HSBC. They supported apple pay for customers in the US since 2014, but only started supporting it in 2015 for customers in Canada and UK and not until 2021 for HSBC cardholders in Mexico. Another example: BBVA. They have supported Apple Pay for years in the US and Spain, but still don’t in Mexico. A third example: Banco Santander, it was the first to support Apple Pay in Spain, but still doesn’t support it in Mexico.