Apple (AAPL) to Let IPhones Accept Credit Cards Without Extra Hardware - Bloomberg

It’s unclear whether the payment acceptance option will be branded as part of Apple Pay, though the team working on the feature has been working within Apple’s payments division since being brought over from Mobeewave, the people said. It’s also not known if Apple intends to partner with an existing payment network for the feature or launch it alone.

My company is building a leading solution in this space, we also partnered with Mastercard for their solution, Visa is working on it, and many other payment companies have things in the works. The one constant: these are all Android-only products. They’re Android-only not because we don’t like iOS, quite the opposite, if we could do this on iOS we would in a heartbeat. We don’t because we don’t have access to do this with the NFC chip in iPhones.

My hopes here are that Apple makes this a part of Apple Pay, and payment providers can bundle this into their point-of-sale apps. As I wrote in a quick Twitter thread, I think this product makes no sense if it tries to live alongside the merchants’ main payment provider, so letting us integrate into it like all other Apple Pay methods seems much better for everyone involved.