THE LATEST edition to the digital payments ecosystem of First National Bank (FNB) has seen 100 000 customers adding their credit, debit, fusion and virtual cards to Apple Pay, according to FNB’s digital payments unit.
Apple Pay is available in South Africa through Absa, Nedbank, Discovery Bank and FNB.
This was despite the inconvenience caused by what the financial institution called an outage last week on the virtual card creation, Apple Pay activation and online shopping authentication. All these issues have been resolved, and FNB apologised to its customers who were affected.
FNB’s head of digital payments, Jason Viljoen, said in an interview that the bank was delighted with the positive response from its retail and commercial customers, who were quick to set up Apple Pay and had already made safe and secure payments.
“The bank continues to accelerate efforts to diversify its digital payments ecosystem to provide a convenient and secure experience across all its payments solutions. Convenient and secure cashless payments, which are synonymous with our customers’ contactless digital payments experience, have become the norm as we strive to limit physical contact for purchases,” said Viljoen.
The bank, which was among the top country’s digitally savvy financial institutions, said more than 700 000 of its customers had an Apple Pay compatible device, which enabled them to add their card to Apple Pay via the FNB app or open the Wallet app to add FNB cards.
Apple Pay is fully functional for all FNB customers. The bank said it was easy to set up Apple Pay on an iPhone using the FNB app. Customers can select “Cards”, choose to create a new virtual card specifically for Apple Pay, or select an existing virtual or other card, then select “Add to Apple Wallet” and follow the instructions.
The bank said customers could also use Apple Pay on iPhone, iPad and Mac devices to make faster and more convenient purchases in apps or on the web without having to create accounts or repeatedly type in shipping and billing information.
In May, Standard Bank said that more than 1.4 million if its customers had downloaded add-ons on the Standard Bank mobile banking app since the Add-on Store launch in February.
The Add-On Store enables customers to download a host of banking products and services, in the form of widgets, called add-ons, within the app.
The Add-on Store works in a similar way to the Apple App Store or Google Play Store.
BUSINESS REPORT