Bill Gates: Apple Pay is "fantastic" and a "real contribution"
Bill Gates yesterday sat down for an insightful interview with Erik Schatzker of Bloomberg where the Microsoft co-founder discussed, amongst other topics, his efforts to leverage the ubiquity of cellphones to help bring affordable and digital banking options to the world's poorest countries.
Midway through the interview, the topic turned briefly to Apple Pay, Apple's upcoming mobile payments platform. Gates had positive things to say about Apple Pay, calling it a "real contribution."
Well, Apple Pay's a great example of how a cell phone that identifies its user in a pretty strong way lets you make a transaction that should be very, very inexpensive. So the fact that in any application I can buy something, that's fantastic. The fact I don't need a physical card anymore, I just do that transaction and you're going to be quite sure about who it is on the other end, that is a real contribution.
Gates further added that it's only a matter of time before similar functionality becomes available across all mobile platforms.
And all the platforms, whether it's Apple's or Google's or Microsoft, you'll see this payment capability get built in. That's built on industry standard protocols, NFC. And these companies have all participated in getting those going. Apple will help make sure it gets to critical mass for all the devices.
As we noted yesterday, the broad mechanisms that govern Apple Pay aren't built on proprietary Apple technologies. Rather, Apple Pay adheres to an emerging industry standard regarding token-based mobile payments and, as a result, there's nothing to prevent companies like Google and Microsoft from implementing similarly secure mobile payment platforms of their own in the near future.
The full Gates interview can be viewed below:
via Business Insider
