Walmart and Apple Pay: At Last

Walmart announced today that they will #finally accept tap to pay solutions, such as Apple Pay. This has been a long time coming, but I can't help but wonder why the sudden change in tune, since they could have done it at any other time in the past 12 years.

My thought is: maybe the economics of requiring EMV or magnetic swipes was getting to a point where fraud losses reached a tipping point. I know, anecdotally because of the industry I'm in, that fraudsters will intentionally damage EMV chips with the intention to force the point of sale machines to fallback to using the magstripe, which is easier to tamper with. At this point, fraud losses typically shift from the issuing bank and processor back to the merchant, in this case Walmart. Since tap to pay cards (and electronic wallets, like Apple Pay) have become very common, legit customers will be more likely to use these methods which are more convenient, secure, and transfer fraud losses back to card issuers.

We may never know for sure, but that's my guess.