PYMNTS.com reckons about 3.5M people used Apple Pay at least once last year. http://www.pymnts.com/in-depth/2015/wanna-know-how-many-apple-pay-users-there-are/

PYMNTS.com reckons about 3.5M people used Apple Pay at least once last year. http://www.pymnts.com/in-depth/2015/wanna-know-how-many-apple-pay-users-there-are/ http://www.pymnts.com/in-depth/2015/wanna-know-how-many-appl... Australia has a mature chip-and-pin and contactless payment model, to the point where we basically can't function when PayWave terminals go down ("you mean I need cash?" … out comes the phone to figure out where the nearest ATM is). Comparing the two markets is not informative, especially given the rollout problems the USA has with any new transaction processing system. In Australia almost half the population were using contactless payment in 2014. No better reference than News Corp. but that does put the number at least as high as 14M users. Note that the paymen handling market in the USA us three-tiered. My understanding is a little fuzzy but they have the card issuer, the payment processor who authorises payments, and the payment settler who handles the money. In Australia we only have issuers and banks, with banks filling the role of the bottom two tiers of the US model. As a result, the entry of Apple Pay into the Australian market involves taking half of the credit card payment settling cash flow away from the banks. So the banks are holding out and fighting Apple any way they can. None of the banks have the expertise to safely implement NFC on my phone. They deploy equipment built by others, using transaction models designed by others, and simply collect money for making sure the systems are functioning. Apple is entirely correct in not allowing third parties to access the NFC circuitry in order to protect the security of Apple Pay. The banks can prove their competence in Android first, but they recognise that the money they are hungry for mostly lives in Appke users' pockets.