Apple’s commitment to allow wider industry access to its iPhone contactless payments technology has been made binding under European Union (EU) antitrust legislation.
The European Commission (EC), the EU’s primary executive body, confirmed the legal changes this week. This signals a key moment, possibly the end of a long-running high-level process concerning Apple’s technology and leading position.
US-based global Big Tech giant Apple had been refusing to allow competitors to access the Near-Field Communication (NFC), otherwise known as ‘tap and go’, technology used to support iPhone contactless payments on Apple Pay.
An EC preliminary investigation was launched seeking to determine whether or not Apple’s limitation of this contactless technology to just Apple Pay would count as a breach of EU antitrust laws and standards.
The preliminary concluded that Apple “abused its dominant position by refusing to supply the NFC input on iOS to competing mobile wallet developers, while reserving such access only to Apple Pay”.
The EC’s statement this week continued: “The Commission’s preliminary view is that Apple’s refusal excluded Apple Pay’s rivals from the market and led to less innovation and choice for iPhone mobile wallets users.
“Such behaviour may breach Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (‘TFEU’), which prohibits the abuse of a dominant position.”
The EC-Apple antitrust dispute is long-running, with the EC taking action against the company off the back of its investigation back in 2022. The disagreement began to come to a close in January 2024 when Apple agreed to open up its payments technology to third party digital wallets, ending Apple Pay’s sole access to the tech.
To ensure this, the California-founded global company made several other commitments. It has pledged to apply a fair and objective non-discriminatory procedure and eligibility criteria to grant NFC access to third-party mobile wallet developers.
The firm will allow users to set the HCE payment app as the default app for in-store payments and to use relevant functionalities such as Field Detect, Double Click and authentication tools like touch ID, Face ID and device passcode.
Lastly, the firm will establish a monitoring mechanism and dispute settlement system for independent review of its access-restricting decisions.
These commitments, and the overriding pledge to allow access to third parties, will apply to all third-party mobile app developers across the whole European Economic Area (EEA) for the next 10 years.
The announcement showcases two things – firstly, the increasing prominence of digital wallets such as Apple Pay, and its competitors. The huge increase in use of these payment products has clearly been large enough to be noticed by the EU’s highest executive body.
Secondly, the two-year saga shows that policymakers are becoming increasingly concerned about the perceived dominance Big Tech firms have in the international payments sector, something that has also caught the attention of national regulators like the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).