Joshua Gans on Apple Pay and Market Power

He writes,

So last week, in some of these stores you could use Apple Pay. This week in CVS and Rite Aid you can’t. The reason appears to be that a bunch of large retailers got together a couple of years ago to develop their own mobile payments solution — mostly to compete with existing banks and credit card associations. They are still doing that and will only launch their app, CurrentC, next year. In the meantime, they have acted to stop Apple Pay and Google Wallet from getting traction.

When a consortium of big legacy companies tries to take on a tech company in an innovative area, I expect an epic fail.

2 thoughts on “Joshua Gans on Apple Pay and Market Power

  1. Given the heavy handed tactics of the retailers, I would not be bothered by apple and google refused to allow CurrentC in their app stores, or at least changing the terms of services in a way that really hurts CurrentC’s business model. Turnabout is fair-play. I doubt apple will do this as they don’t have to. CurrentC will fail because its users a poor experiences and less security. But Steve Jobs was a vengeful guy if he was alive and this happened, he may responded in kind.

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