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| Apple Pay image / Korea Times file |
By Anna J. Park
Despite earlier market expectations that Apple Pay would be launched in Korea from Nov. 30, it is estimated that the starting date of the payment service in the country will be delayed to sometime around December.
Hyundai Card, which is a key partner in bringing Apple Pay to be available in Korea, remained tight-lipped about the matter, in a phone conversation with The Korea Times on Wednesday.
"As of now, we cannot confirm any matters regarding Apple Pay," an official from Hyundai Card told The Korea Times.
Market watchers say the deviation from the slated launch schedule is due in part to the delayed deliberation by the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) on the contractual terms and conditions of Apple Pay. Once the financial watchdog's examination is over and its key clauses are done, the payment service is likely to be available in the country. That's why it is expected that the service would be able to be launched as early as sometime around December.
While both Hyundai Card and Apple have been declining to give out any detailed information about Apple Pay's launch in Korea during the past months, various pieces of evidence have been spotted here and there to corroborate the imminent launch of the payment service in Korea.
First off, the recent terms and conditions of Hyundai Card, which were leaked in October, stated that the clauses related to Apple Pay would take effect from Nov. 30, meaning that the mobile payment service would launch from the same date.
Some coffee chain branches as well as Lotte retailers also recently notified their customers about their introduction of new card payment terminals that use the near-field communication (NFC) system, which is a set of short-range wireless technologies. Since Apple Pay uses NFC technology to make contactless payments via smart mobile devices, the local stores' payment terminal equipment upgrades were interpreted as Apple Pay's coming into the country in the near future.
Since being launched in the U.S. in 2014, Apple Pay has allowed users of Apple devices, both iPhone and iPad, to make contactless payments without using cards. Now that more than eight years have passed since the global launch, Apple Pay is available in more than 60 countries. Yet, Korea has remained the only country in Northeast Asia where Apple's mobile payment service is not available. Both Japan and China started to offer the tech giant's mobile payment service from 2016.
One of the key stumbling blocks to Apple Pay launching earlier in Korea was that most of its card-affiliated local shops rely on magnetic secure transmission (MST) technology, which is different from Apple Pay's NFC system. Only about 70,000 stores out of the total three million stores nationwide are estimated to have been equipped with the NFC system.
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