Apple introduces Tap to Pay for Brazilian businesses

Photo: Koshiro K/Shutterstock

Apple on Tuesday announced that Brazilian businesses can now use the Tap to Pay iPhone feature, free of transaction fees.

Brazil becomes the sixth country where Tap to Pay is available, after the U.S., the United Kingdom, Australia, the Netherlands, and Taiwan. Apple’s feature arrives a year after Google Tap, launched by Android.

Apple’s Tap to Pay feature equips vendors, both small and large, to accept payments via various methods, including Apple Pay, contactless credit and debit cards, and other digital wallets. All such payments can be facilitated using an iPhone and the corresponding iOS app, with no requirement for supplementary hardware or payment terminals. Tap to Pay will be available on the iPhone X and later models; the first company to operate it will be CloudWalk.

“Our goal is to democratize access to the world’s most innovative payment services and give vendors the ability to process payments quickly,” said Luis Silva, chief executive at CloudWalk, in a statement.

Apple says all transactions conducted via Tap to Pay are subject to encryption and are processed utilizing the Secure Element. Furthermore, the company says it retains no knowledge of specific purchase details or the purchaser’s identity.

In Q1 2023, contactless payments accounted for 44.3 percent of in-person card purchases — from 29 percent a year prior. Over BRL 190 billion (USD 39 billion) were transferred through this means of payment during Q1.

The tap-on-phone technology is expected to have seismic effects in the payments industry, for which the distribution of physical credit card machines and the capital expenditure associated with them remain relevant. But as smartphones become credit card machines of their own and payments become more and more digital, the legacy card machines may soon cease to exist.

Currently, Apple is third in smartphone market share in Brazil, with 17.83 percent of devices. It lags behind Motorola (18.81%) and Samsung (37.14%) in the preferences of Brazilians, according to August 2023 data from monitoring company Statcounter.

Diogo Rodriguez

Diogo Rodriguez is a social scientist and journalist based in São Paulo. He worked in the first Brazilian Report team, back in 2017, leaving in 2018 to pursuit a master's degree from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. He has returned to The Brazilian Report in 2023.