Jakob Interesting! Curious if that's the official statement of Rabobank as a whole or just of the local branche. You'd imagine that there are some strategics at play... (-EDIT- Actually missed the tweet statement of the webcare! So it IS an official response! Wow.) The article confuses "efficient" and "cheap" though. The payment traffic in the Netherlands is cheap, but it's not necessarily efficient. Yes, it works - but we have to build stuff to patch some shortcomings. What bothers me as well is the repeat statement that the problem is Apple limiting NFC to their own service. Well, yeah - that's what it was designed to do in an iPhone and quite frankly I hope they don't open it up. (Before lots of people jump all over me: yes, I indeed just said that. :P I see a purpose for walled gardens for certain services - and this is one of them. You don't have to agree and no hard feelings if you don't. ;))
It's strange that it works in pretty much all countries in the (south/north-)west of the EU, except here... Maybe it's too cheap, heh.
I don't think a whole lot of people would mind to pay a little bit extra for convenience. According to https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2016/12/28/nrc-checkt-consument-doet-zeven-betalingen-per-dag-5946638-a1538743 we have less than a single transaction per day average. (Some days you have more than others, that's normal.). Let's make it 2 average for the heck of it. If you have to pay 1 cent extra per transaction if it's Apple Pay, that's ~€0,61 per month or €7,32 per year. That doesn't sound too bad... Considering that it's actually 1 day average - let's say the banks start charging €0,50 per month extra for services such as Apple Pay and Google Pay. (Note: they can't specifically claim it's for Apple Pay, so they'd have to make it an addon for "enable mobile payments" or something that enables NFC, Google Pay, Apple Pay, Garmin Pay, etc. Apple will actually allow that afaik.) This would cover a large chunk of the transaction costs Apple is apparently willing to settle for (0.05%). Of course with bunq you already pay a rather high monthly fee to have all these functions, but at other banks with cheaper or "Free" accounts: I can understand they might want to use a different construction or addons instead of one size fits all.
Alas, I bet this won't be possible until the current agreements end. And when they end, I hope we'll finally be rid of Maestro/VPAY as well.
And I hope room will be created for Apple Pay. But there's another problem lurking: the new EU-rules for transaction caps. Apple will have to adapt their model, most likely. And in the event that happens, I bet they'll change to a flatfee per transaction due each month and the banks will have to figure out how to deal with it. That's already possible now, but the other banks simply refuse to do so at this time.
Let's hope it changes soon, but I fear Apple nor Google is willing to deal with this here at this time.
But hey... The least Apple can do is make it available on bunq officially. Rabobank already stated now they're apparently not interested. If ING and ABN have similar thoughts: no point in negotiating and screw them. Make it official here, anybody who wants it can move over (golden opportunity for bunq to have a more entry level package as well perhaps, to draw more people in) and those who don't care can stay where they are. But then at least people have a choice to use Apple/Google Pay without having to deal with workarounds and fear it might stop working.
So instead of asking the banks whom refuse to continue, perhaps it's more prudent to start giving more feedback to Apple to at least release it here through bunq. And heck, I bet banks like Revolut and N26 would be happy to join in on the fun as well. Multiple banks, just not the big ones. :)
P.S. They're saying Apple Pay puts up restrictions none of the others do. The letter specifically states Google Pay does not. Which begs the question... Why is Google not interested in launching Google Pay here either? :P Apparently the Rabobank is feeling OK with GPay but isn't getting it. That's a bit confusing.
