Jeroen 🏳️🌈 sorry for the late reply, I was rebooting my computer infrastructure after scheduled maintenance, and it took a bit longer then expected, yes apple does take a cut, official figures are not know and vary by bank/country/region, but from what we do know, is that yes Apple asks banks a fee per transaction for Apple Pay.
From what we know, it's about 0.15% of the total transaction value for credit-card payments €/£/$10 and up. And about € 0.005 for each debit card transaction, plus a fixed fee per bank for each activation of Apple Pay per card, which is about 50 cents.
So If i buy something for € 100,- the bank has to pay Apple 15 euro cents for that transaction. Which still doesn't explain why it still isn't available in The Netherlands, because then the banks would have to pay apple just 0.5cts per transaction as debit cards are more common here. but here's the rub, last year an article appeared on a dutch financial site which stated that dutch bank ABN receives about 5,6 euro cents for each card payment from a merchant that is a customer of theirs, of this 5,6ct ABN has to pay their expenses which is about 2,3 euro-cents for the card payments, of which a part is tax and the rest goes to the card network such as MasterCard or visa, so ABN has 3,3 euro-cents profit on each payment where they are the receiving bank for a shop or business. Now imagine, each time this would be done through say a mobile payment provider such as Apple Pay, ABN would only get 2,8 cents of profit because apple wants that .5 ct on the debit card + a fixed fee for each card activation. As the interchange fee the banks pay to MasterCard and visa is already extremely low in the Netherlands, it does not leave much room for apple to also take a cut.
(but please remember this is just an example from what I have gathered, as much of this information is not public, we can only guess ate the reasons why it's not available yet)
