Apple Pay Ropes In ‘Dozens’ Of New Banks and Stores

Apple Pay Alex Washburn / WIRED

Apple Pay continues to gain momentum.

Two months after its launch, dozens of additional banks and retailers—as well as an NBA arena—have agreed to use Apple’s new mobile payments system, which lets people pay for stuff with their iPhones, according to The New York Times .

With these new additions, The Times says, Apple Pay can now tie into bank cards that account for 90 percent of all transactions by purchase volume. SunTrust, Barclaycard, USAA, TD Bank North America, and Commerce Bank, among many others, have agreed to work with the digital wallet service.

Meanwhile, retailers such as Staples and the grocery chains Winn-Dixie and Albertsons are now backing Apple Pay. And on Friday, the Orlando Magic’s basketball arena Amway Center will begin taking Apple Pay payments at its various retail, food and beverage stands.

Apple hasn’t officially released the numbers showing how well its digital wallet is performing, but CEO Tim Cook said in October that users activated over 1 million credit cards on the service in its first 72 hours, and that Apple Pay is already more successful than all other smartphone payment services combined, citing his conversations with credit card giants MasterCard and Visa.

This kind of mobile payment service isn’t new by any means. For years, similar service have promised to reinvent in-store payments, including Google Wallet and mobile carrier consortium Softcard, which touts the service formerly known as Isis mobile wallet. Another consortium of top U.S. retailers, MCX, is expected to roll out its own mobile payments system, called CurrentC, by 2015, and some members of that coalition have actively blocked the use of Apple Pay in their stores in anticipation of CurrentC’s arrival. Additionally, according to a report from news site Re/code, Samsung is in talks with payments startup LoopPay to launch an Apple Pay competitor next year.

But of all these players, it is Apple that is uniquely poised to tip smartphone payments into the mainstream—something it is already starting to do. The company controls the handsets—the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus—that support the system, and it controls the software needed to operate the digital wallet. The technology at the heart of Apple Pay isn’t new, either: it uses NFC, or Near Field Communication, to replace credit card swipes. But with so many partnerships with credit card companies, banks and merchants, and a strong marketing push from both Apple and those partners, Apple Pay may be the one service that gains mass adoption among consumers.