Apple Pay Lands the Big Five Canadian Banks

Apple Pay’s second anniversary will be coming up with the end of summer—in October, actually—and it’s already made a lot of headway in the two years it’s been in play thus far.

A new milestone has been achieved, and it’s landed the five biggest Canadian banks as Apple Pay users as a result.

As of Tuesday, both the Royal Bank of Canada and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce will allow debit and major credit card holders to use the same technology that runs Apple Pay.

Cardholders with ATB Financial and Canadian Tire Bank will also get in not long after, and BMO Financial will step in over the course of the next few weeks.

Canadian Tire will only support its own credit card, but Canadian Imperial and Royal Bank customers will be able to use Apple Pay with credit and debit cards alike.

Canadians have been anticipating Apple Pay access for some time, and even when the service finally launched—a little better than a year after its launch in the United States—it was still fraught with limits, particularly the one that only allowed users to use it with American Express cards.

Canadian banks have been eagerly pursuing mobile payments apps of their own, but with customers clamoring for access, keeping them out of the field is likely to do more harm than good to the banks.

It’s sort of a balancing act for the banks; no one wants to miss out on the potential big dollars that a payment processing operation can mean.

Too long a delay, however, can get users looking for alternatives to that bank altogether, and that means complete losses of business instead of partial losses.

The banks in general have been somewhat slow to adopt, but with debit card use in Canada the highest in the world—an average of 16 million times a day—that kind of delay could be costing them big.

The die, however, appears to be cast, and those who were hoping the banks would get in on Apple Pay before too much longer are about to get their wish.