Apple in the News - Payments and Enterprise with IBM

A couple of big stories involving Apple came to light over the last 24 hours.

First up is a very interesting move in to digital payments, currently exclusively in Japan.

http://www.paymentssource.com/news/emerging-payments/apple-lays-foundation-for-digital-payments-in-japan-3018532-1.html

Here is a snippet from that piece:

ITunes Pass is the latest of many small steps Apple has made that could be combined to enable mobile commerce, contactless payments and a mobile wallet. And the company boasted in April that most of its 800 million iTunes accounts have credit cards already attached. But its Passbook app, a wallet that houses other apps, has mostly been a sandbox for third parties.

"It would seem with this move Apple is boiling the proverbial frog. It's a small, yet significant move that slowly transitions Passbook from a digital storage container to a digital wallet," says Jordan McKee, a senior analyst covering mobile payments at 451 Research Mobility Team.

Next is the announcement of a close partnership between Apple and IBM for the Enterprise.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/15/apple-teams-up-with-ibm-for-huge-expansive-enterprise-push/

Here is a snippet from that piece:

Apple has announced a strategic partnership with IBM that will see the enterprise giant transfer over 150 of their enterprise and IT apps and tools to Apple platforms natively, and will also have IBM selling Apple iPhones and iPads to its business clients all over the world. In an interview with CNBC, Apple CEO Tim Cook and IBM CEO Virginia Rometty both told the network that Apple and IBM are like “puzzle pieces” that fit perfectly together.

“We knew that we needed to have a partner that deeply understood each of the verticals,” Cook told CNBC. “That had scale, that had a lot of dirt under their fingernails so to speak from really understanding each of these verticals and we found a kindred spirit in IBM.”

Happy Reading,

J.W. Gant

**UPDATE** iTunes Pass is now available in the USA and UK.
http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/itunes-pass-mobile-payments-japan/#!bg2GTN

**UPDATE #2** A bit more analysis on Apple's moves towards a mobile wallet
http://www.pymnts.com/news/acquiring/2014/coming-this-fall-apples-mwallet/#.U9ELS-NdX9Y