Good news Apple Pay fans! MCX confirms that retailers face no fines for leaving CurrentC support behind
In an effort to mitigate the avalanche of criticism stemming from Rite Aid and CVS' decision to disable Apple Pay support, MCX yesterday put up a blogpost to help crystallize what it terms a "misinformed conversation."
One notable clarification is that MCX's CurrentC app will, in fact, support payment via credit cards. It remains unclear, though, if this was always the intention or if this is merely a reaction to the recent controversy surrounding Apple Pay.
Provide consumers with multiple ways to pay at their favorite merchants, including merchant gift cards, credit cards and debit accounts and personal checking accounts. MCX has plans to add additional forms of payment, including credit cards.
Now much has been made of MCX partners being precluded from supporting competing mobile payment platforms. MCX confirms that this is indeed the case, but adds that there are no fines levied if a merchant decides to stop supporting MCX. This is actually great news because it gives retailers the freedom to support Apple Pay in the likelihood that CurrentC fails to gain any traction in the marketplace.
MCX merchants make their own decisions about what solutions they want to bring to their customers; the choice is theirs. When merchants choose to work with MCX, they choose to do so exclusively and we're proud of the long list of merchants who have partnered with us. Importantly, if a merchant decides to stop working with MCX, there are no fines.
At the same time, keep in mind that retailers who continue to partner with MCX are not free to do as they please. According to a recent report in the New York Times, MCX partners who break exclusivity and offer support for competing mobile platforms such as Apple Pay and Google Wallet face steep fines. MCX did note during a press conference yesterday that Apple Pay support might be allowed "later."
As for security, much has been made of the impressively secure mechanisms that govern Apple Pay and the seemingly lax, by comparison, security mechanisms of CurrentC. To that end, MCX's writes:
On the data security side, the technology choices we've made take consumers' security into account at every aspect of their core functionality. We want to assure you, MCX does not store sensitive customer information in the app. Users' payment information is instead stored in our secure cloud-hosted network. Removing this sensitive information from the mobile device significantly lowers the risk of it being inappropriately disclosed in a case that the mobile device is hacked, stolen or otherwise compromised.
And yet, it appears that CurrentC already seems to have a problem keeping its list of consumer email addresses secure.
