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Apple is bringing its “Tap to Pay” service to Germany: retailers in this country are now able to use the iPhone on site as an NFC checkout terminal, without the need for special additional hardware. To do this, the customer simply places his or her preferred contactless payment method on the retailer’s iPhone as usual. As the company has announced, it works with smartphones and Apple Pay or Google Pay as well as NFC-enabled cards.
Support for Girocard is to follow
This will eventually make it easier for small and medium-sized retailers to accept contactless payments. Payments are not processed by Apple itself, but by the usual payment service providers. Other companies, including Adyen, SumUp and myPOS, are offering this to their customers, initially in Germany. The fee charged to retailers is set by the respective provider.
According to Apple, Stripe, Revolut and Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe will follow later this year as additional payment service providers for “tap to pay.” The company is already using the service in its stores, and it will be in Germany as well. Apple emphasized that it has “no knowledge” of tap-to-pay transactions, and no card numbers or transaction information should be stored on the iPhone checkout terminal.
At launch, the service accepts payments from credit and debit cards such as MasterCard and Visa. In the future, it will also be possible to make payments on iPhone terminals using the contactless Girocard (or integrated into Apple Pay). Apple promises that savings banks will provide proper support for this in 2024.
No iPhone direct payments between private users
Tap to Pay is in effect from 2022 and the service is already available in other European countries, including Italy and the Netherlands. This function should not be confused with an innovation announced for iOS 18: in the future, users will be able to exchange funds directly between two iPhones by placing the devices together. However, this feature, called “Tap to Cash”, is linked to the “Apple Cash” account, which is only available in the USA, and is therefore not included in Germany.
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