As reported by local outlet The Verifier, Apple Pay has officially launched in Israel following multiple reports suggesting an imminent launch sometime this year.
Ever since its launch in the United States in 2014, Apple Pay has slowly expanded to more countries worldwide while at the same time expanding the list of financial institutions that support the feature. With Apple Pay, users can easily add their credit or debit cards from supported banks to their iPhone and Apple Watch to make purchases at contactless payment terminals around the world. Apple Pay is also available on the Mac for web purchases.
At launch, there may be some banks that don't yet have support for Apple Pay; however, the list of supported banks will grow with time. Users can add a card to Apple Pay by heading over to the Wallet app on iPhone, pressing the plus button in the top-right hand corner, and following the on-screen prompts.
Top Rated Comments
If you are a bank in Israel, it doesn't give you any competitive advantage to support Apple Pay. Until the first bank in the country adopts it. Then you are in danger of losing customers to that bank, so suddenly all the other banks are keen to support ApplePay as well. Apple has to convince ONE bank in a country.
Israel had two problems. One is standard for payments which was using a local design that was not supporting international contactless payment until last year (Apple Pay support only started last year in Israel when they finally officially supported EMV, not ever, don’t make stuff up), and second is the availability of contactless points in businesses which also only started to be common last year.
then they needed to support apple system which required the regulate body to approve which also took time because of the mess politically they are.
That also took until mid last year.
then, when all that hurdle was done, they were able to release support. The regulator said they can release support now, and they all worked to make it work at the same time.
israel banks and credit companies wanted to support it since 2017 but the regulator did not approve.
As I’ve learned overtime the greatest hurdle for apple pay is the archaic way of processing card payments in most countries: they have only one or two local companies that act as switches to process payments. Since they usually can’t handle the tokens generated by Apple Pay, that makes it impossible to implement apple pay with locally issued bank cards until Visa and Mastercard are allowed to operate as local switches too. That’s why Apple Pay took so long to arrive to countries in Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa and, I bet, Israel too.