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CurrentC has no chance of catching on because it's not CurrentC vs Apple Pay, it's CurrentC vs legacy credit cards. From a user's perspective, the current user

CurrentC has no chance of catching on because it's not CurrentC vs Apple Pay, it's CurrentC vs legacy credit cards. From a user's perspective, the current user experience around credit cards is pretty good. You get a tangible, color coded interface and a tactile interaction mechanism. Swipes work pretty reliably and the time it takes to pull out a credit card is very small. When you're competing with a solution like this, even minor differences in UX can be dealbreakers. One thing I didn't see much talk about with the iPhone 6 launch was that Apple were the first phone makers (AFAICT) who managed to put NFC on the edge of a device rather than the center. I've tried paying with Google Wallet before and mashing a giant phone against a tiny contactless reader was error prone, frustrating and made you feel like a dork doing it. I tried it 2 or 3 times and then went back to credit cards. I can't imagine how much worse this CurrentC solution is going to be in real life and how hard it will fail.

stephen_g 12y ago
The other thing is that if retailers disable the NFC reader then contactless cards won't work... I'm not sure what adoption is like in the US, but in Australia pretty much every single plastic credit card (and Visa/MasterCard debit) supports contactless payments, which is an awesome user experience. You literally just pull out the card and touch it to the machine, and some places it's approved in less than a second. It only works for payments under $100 (for security reasons) - otherwise you chip and pin. I don't see CurrenC being able to compete with that, chip and pin, or Apple pay...
- martingordon 12y ago
  Contactless was a thing here in the US, but at least in my experience, it's going away. I've had a few credit cards replaced over the past couple of months (one Chase, one Amex) and while they've gained an EMV chip, they've also lost contactless functionality (which went by Blink and ExpressPay respectively).
  - stephen_g 12y ago
    That's interesting, because in Australia they're really popular and both EMV and PayPass/PayWave came in at the same time and use the same chip in the card. You can actually see the RFID antenna terminating in the EMV chip in one of my cards which is semi-transparent.
- thefreeman 12y ago
  It doesn't sound like they are blocking it on a hardware level. More like their POS system detects that it is an Apple Pay payment and arbitrarily denies it.
ntakasaki 12y ago
They just need to tie it to store loyalty cards for discounts and coupons for it to succeed. At the grocery store I shop, people even go to the trouble of entering their phone number to track themselves if they don't have the card, to save a couple of bucks. Since CurrentC avoids the credit card merchant fees, they can give even steeper discounts to push it.
- eridius 12y ago
  Walgreens has supported Apple's Passbook on iPhone since it launched, allowing me to always have my Walgreens card ready. Heck, I don't even have a physical card. Sure, I don't get coupons through Passbook, but if I cared about that, the Walgreens iOS app presumably has them. The same approach (Passbook for the card, and a separate app for added functionality like coupons) should work for any other retailer too. Heck, if the coupon thing really is an issue, they could join together to come up with a common app for retailer coupons without trying to muck with payments. Which is to say, store discount cards and coupons is basically a solved problem already. Trying to tie that to a payment mechanism just seems futile.
dingaling 12y ago
> Apple were the first phone makers (AFAICT) who managed to put NFC on the edge of a device rather than the center. I'm not sure how that particular rumour started but it is inaccurate. Some HTC and Sony phones, from personal knowledge, have their NFC antennas embedded above^W [ Edit from evidence: near ] the camera at the 'top' of the phone. Edit: Here's a page of antenna location diagrams. It looks like we're actually regressing... notice how Samsung used to have the antenna under their logo but now it's part of the battery housing! http://www.octopus.com.hk/customer-service/checking-your-balance-and-transactions/octopus-app/nfc-location/en/index.html http://www.octopus.com.hk/customer-service/checking-your-bal... ... and here's where it is in the iPhone 6, about the same location as the Sony phones http://images.techtimes.com/data/images/full/12514/iphone-6-logic-board.jpg?w=600 http://images.techtimes.com/data/images/full/12514/iphone-6-...
- shalmanese 12y ago
  I haven't used any of those handsets but it looks like you still have to put the back of the phone against a reader to register. Do any of them allow you to place the edge of the phone on the reader?

stephen_g 12y ago

The other thing is that if retailers disable the NFC reader then contactless cards won't work... I'm not sure what adoption is like in the US, but in Australia pretty much every single plastic credit card (and Visa/MasterCard debit) supports contactless payments, which is an awesome user experience. You literally just pull out the card and touch it to the machine, and some places it's approved in less than a second. It only works for payments under $100 (for security reasons) - otherwise you chip and pin. I don't see CurrenC being able to compete with that, chip and pin, or Apple pay...

martingordon 12y ago
Contactless was a thing here in the US, but at least in my experience, it's going away. I've had a few credit cards replaced over the past couple of months (one Chase, one Amex) and while they've gained an EMV chip, they've also lost contactless functionality (which went by Blink and ExpressPay respectively).
- stephen_g 12y ago
  That's interesting, because in Australia they're really popular and both EMV and PayPass/PayWave came in at the same time and use the same chip in the card. You can actually see the RFID antenna terminating in the EMV chip in one of my cards which is semi-transparent.
thefreeman 12y ago
It doesn't sound like they are blocking it on a hardware level. More like their POS system detects that it is an Apple Pay payment and arbitrarily denies it.

ntakasaki 12y ago

They just need to tie it to store loyalty cards for discounts and coupons for it to succeed. At the grocery store I shop, people even go to the trouble of entering their phone number to track themselves if they don't have the card, to save a couple of bucks. Since CurrentC avoids the credit card merchant fees, they can give even steeper discounts to push it.

eridius 12y ago
Walgreens has supported Apple's Passbook on iPhone since it launched, allowing me to always have my Walgreens card ready. Heck, I don't even have a physical card. Sure, I don't get coupons through Passbook, but if I cared about that, the Walgreens iOS app presumably has them. The same approach (Passbook for the card, and a separate app for added functionality like coupons) should work for any other retailer too. Heck, if the coupon thing really is an issue, they could join together to come up with a common app for retailer coupons without trying to muck with payments. Which is to say, store discount cards and coupons is basically a solved problem already. Trying to tie that to a payment mechanism just seems futile.

dingaling 12y ago

> Apple were the first phone makers (AFAICT) who managed to put NFC on the edge of a device rather than the center. I'm not sure how that particular rumour started but it is inaccurate. Some HTC and Sony phones, from personal knowledge, have their NFC antennas embedded above^W [ Edit from evidence: near ] the camera at the 'top' of the phone. Edit: Here's a page of antenna location diagrams. It looks like we're actually regressing... notice how Samsung used to have the antenna under their logo but now it's part of the battery housing! http://www.octopus.com.hk/customer-service/checking-your-balance-and-transactions/octopus-app/nfc-location/en/index.html http://www.octopus.com.hk/customer-service/checking-your-bal... ... and here's where it is in the iPhone 6, about the same location as the Sony phones http://images.techtimes.com/data/images/full/12514/iphone-6-logic-board.jpg?w=600 http://images.techtimes.com/data/images/full/12514/iphone-6-...

shalmanese 12y ago
I haven't used any of those handsets but it looks like you still have to put the back of the phone against a reader to register. Do any of them allow you to place the edge of the phone on the reader?