Alfa Bank developers legally gained access to the NFC chip on the iPhone and found a way to make payments as comfortably as with the official Apple Pay service, but through the bank’s application.
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An alternative to contactless payments, Apple Pay, will be available only to those Alfa Bank clients who use Mir cards – the solution will hit the market in 2025. “We are now actively testing it and plan to show it to clients and the Russian market as early as 2025. This technology involves the possibility of paying with a card of the Mir payment system.”,” a representative of Alfa Bank told RBC. In the future, the solution will become available to all participants in the payment systems market.
To use the new contactless payment service, the iPhone owner will need to open the bank’s application and link a card to it. “The user experience is in many ways similar to the process of paying through bank pay services on Android devices – when the client selects the card that he wants to link for contactless payment via NFC”– said the credit institution and emphasized that when communicating between the phone and the terminal, only protocols officially open by Apple will be used without workarounds.
Alfa Bank also intends to improve the software package for POS terminals on Android devices. “Refinement of the software package of the POS terminal network is necessary to ensure the acceptance of payment data on cards using a protocol that is open to developers on iOS”said a bank representative. Similar requirements are imposed on other alternative technologies that have previously been announced on the market.
Until the spring of 2022, contactless payment services from Apple and Google, respectively, worked on iPhone and Android smartphones, but subsequently American companies left the Russian market and turned off their services in the country; The MirPay application was also removed from the Google Play store. Today, Russians can use contactless payments on their phones only through the apps of some banks and only on Android – Apple blocked the NFC chip on the iPhone for third-party applications, but was recently forced to open it in European countries. Last week, the first alternative contactless payment service, the Norwegian Vipps, went live on the iPhone.
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