According to a report on AppleInsider today it looks as though the UK will be the first country to offer ApplePay outside of the US when it gets the service later this summer.
In the original report in The Telegraph, an anonymous source said that Apple plans to announce UK Apple Pay availability at today’s Worldwide Developers Conference, which gets underway in under an hour. It’s expected that the service will start in the next two months.
The Telegraph says that contactless spending in the UK has increased to 2.3 billion pounds ($3.51 billion) last year, despite a seeming lack of interest among consumers. As AppleInsider notes, many retailers in the UK have in recent years taken steps to equip point-of-sale terminals with NFC transmitters, and in fact these days you’re more likely to find a shop that does accept contactless payment than not. London Transport also recently enabled NFC transactions on its trains, tubes, and buses, so presumably we could see iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch owners being able to use their devices to touch-in at London transport terminals very soon.
Source: http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/06/07/apple-pay-to-reportedly-land-in-uk-by-summer
