Apple Pay Coming To China In April?

According to reports on kapron ASIA, it seems as though Apple and China Union Pay have finally struck a deal that had only existed in rumors until now, meaning that the Chinese version of Apple Pay could be set to roll in April.

According to a Bank of China-related Weibo post, while Americans are having their annual panic about taxes, Chinese citizens will be getting their official Apple Pay announcement; on April 28, the service will launch.

This timing is similar to the original timeline despite reports earlier this year that negotiations were going less smoothly than initially hoped.

An Apple Pay launch in China would be a big step forward for NFC-based proximity payments in China. Mobile pay is popular thanks to Alipay’s remote mobile payments, but NFC has not quite caught on. It isn’t that NFC payments are locked out technologically speaking – there are over 4 million POS terminals in China that support UnionPay’s NFC-enabled Quickpass technology. That is about a quarter of all Chinese terminals (as opposed to the 2 percent or so of merchants in the U.S. that are NFC ready today).

There is a slight chance that the launch will be delayed, according to the source, but it seems clear that Apple Pay China is a thing that it is coming soon.