eCom 2025 

18 months of Revolutionary Change in How we Buy Online

Short Blog

Follow up to my June 2024 blogs – eCom Politics and Scenarios and Fastlane + FIDO Enabled Checkout. Today, we focus on the changes, what merchants are asking for, and what consumers will adopt (and when). 

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Google Secure Payment Authentication (SPA)

Read First – Blog on SPA from Checkout.com

Background Reading – June blog eCom politics and Scenarios, and Identity, Authentication and Risk

What’s the big news here? SPA allows Google to stand at par with ApplePay in providing the best-authenticated checkout experience. Google looks to have taken TWO MASSIVE pieces out of the authentication process: 1) 3DS handshake (putitting in Cryptogram and 2) A step up from the Issuer (possibly – a significant portion of this blog). This is a generational improvement and massive simplificaiton of the current 3DS flow.

The mobile platform is key to authentication and Google is the preferred partner of every bank, merchant and network. Their challenge in SPA? Doesn’t seem Checkout.com coordinated with the networks on SPA (ie liability shift OR step up). I think it will get worked out as the quality of this innovation is just fantastic.

As I wrote in June, ApplePay 2.0 plans to cross the chasm from mobile only to desktop (as announced at WWDC). Google is proving that they have the same capability, as Chrome makes up about 10-12% of eCom and over 30% of guest checkout at most retailers; they are positioned well (particularly in Android markets).

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eCom – Politics and Scenarios

Frank Young – Contributor

What are banks talking about this week? How did Apple’s announcement impact them? While 15bps on 2% of eCom GDV is a nuisance, 15bps on 15% of eComm GDV is an earthquake. 

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Apple Wallet “2.0” in iOS18 – What’s In It?

Winners: Consumers, Merchants, Banks, Networks and Affirm

Losers: Branded PayPal and Venmo

Apple’s WWDC is on Day 2. Today we will see significant enhancements to ApplePay and Wallet in forthcoming iOS18 (to be released this fall). Here are the highlights in order of impact. 

1 – ApplePay in eCom

ApplePay will be supported in every browser. This will be a game changer and dramatically increase payment volume flowing through Apple wallet (and their platform). Just last week, the WSJ published a great piece on why retailers hate that consumers make large purchases on their computers. Apple will expand ApplePay to support all browsers AND provide a major upgrade in experience, security and fraud. 

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ApplePay gets iOS Competition – Curve

© Starpoint LLP, 2024. No part of this site, blog.starpointllp.com, may be reproduced or retransmitted, in whole or in part, in any manner without the permission of the copyright owner. Also see our Legal/Disclaimer (this is a highly opinionated and partially informed blog).

The Times (London) Article – May 29 2024


In January of this year, Apple offered commitments to the EU to assuage their concerns about NFC payments and mobile wallets related to the EU’s Marketplace Fairness Act (MFA—see blog). Apple’s approach follows Google’s model in Host Card Emulation (HCE—see Apple Developer Doc).

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Wallets, APIs and Trust

6 Page Blog

Top of mind today are Wallets, Identity and Application Program Interfaces (APIs). APIs are the core concept behind many new business models investors must decipher:

  • Software as a Service (SaaS)
  • Payments as a Service (PaaS)
  • Banking as a Service (PaaS)
  • Open Banking – PISP, AISP, ..etc
  • Account Aggregation – FDX, Plaid, Akoya, … etc
  • Payment Service Provider (PSP) – Stripe, Adyen, PYPL/Braintree, … etc

Previously, I’ve covered this topic in Open Banking and Open Payments and Trust Networks (2020)  Part 3 – Internet 2.5 (2022), Modularity and Trust (2022) and Evolution of V/MA – Moving Beyond Cards (2021). Summary points from these previous blogs:

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Apple Launches Pay Later

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/03/apple-introduces-apple-pay-later/

Apple Pay Later was announced at Apple’s WWDC on June 6, 2022  (Youtube – ~21:00 in). I covered the details last year in Apple Pay Later – What is it? 

Today it is going live in a limited rollout. Summary points

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Merchants Tokenize – eCom Wallet Challenges

UPDATE – Nov 29 2022 – Note that I have conflated the relationship between SRC and 3DS 2.0. 3DS 2.0 is the authentication protocol used by SRC. 3DS 2.0 has been widely adopted as a mandatory replacement to 3DS 1.0. Part of the driver for adoption was the EU SCA mandate. SRC has NOT been widely adopted as it is a fairly broken consumer experience at the moment. 

I’m at M2020 today and it has been a “back to normal” fantastic event. Let me put my “merchant hat” on for a story from their perspective.

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Apple – #1 Payment Innovator

As Apple is set to launch the iPhone 14 today, I was thinking about the significance of ApplePay’s innovations to V/MA and how these innovations benefit the entire network of merchants and consumers. Making payments easy is hard… Apple is the lead “innovator” within the V/MA networks at the consumer touchpoint (with Google, Samsung, PayPal and others in the mix). Their “wallet” and branded integration into both POS AND mCom is unrivaled and represents 93% of all mobile wallet payments in the US (2021).

This 2021 Pulse Network Debit Whitepaper provides the best public view on performance (US Only), with TPV CAGR over 50%. Quite frankly, when it comes to mobile payments, it’s silly to talk about anything else by ApplePay in the US

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