We are just days away from seeing another iConic device coming directly for Apple’s corridors and we need not say that the device will be called iPhone 6. However, there is one thing that is going to make this successor of iPhone 5 more desirable than the earlier expectations of iPhone enthusiasts.
As iPhone 5 during its launch last year made several headlines because of its fingerprint sensor, iPhone 6 is also hot in rumours because of a chip that is going to make it mobile payment enable.
There are reports that Apple has already inked a deal with American Express to facilitate mobile payments initiated by iPhone 6’s NFC (near field communication) chip. Apart from American Express, there are reports of Visa and MasterCard also getting aboard with Apple for the digital payment system.
Though analyst like Van L. Baker, vice-president and research director mobile and client computing services of Gartner, is one of those people who don’t think that Apple is going to introduce the NFC chip in the upcoming iPhone 6, odds are against the views of Baker.
If Apple launches the iPhone 6 with NFC chip and has Visa, American Express and MasterCard by its side, this is not going to be good news for payment gateways like PayPal.
PayPal enjoys 152.5 million registered accounts by the second quarter of this year, and obviously there will be many of them using Apple devices. When we look at Apple’s side, there are over 800 million iTunes accounts and many of them are linked to credit cards for the obvious payment reasons.
According to Baird analyst Colin Sebastian, “while there is no shortage of competition in payments, we view Apple as perhaps the most legitimate potential threat to PayPal’s strong position.”
The suspense over the presence of NFC chip in iPhone 6 is definitely going to reach climax on September 9. But the arrival of NFC chip in an Apple device is imminent in near future and PayPal has got to change something to survive the upcoming onslaught from the Cupertino corridors.
