Credit: CC0 Public Domain You'll soon be able to use your iPhone or Apple Watch to pay for prescriptions at CVS or a Slurpee at 7-Eleven. The two previous retail holdouts will start rolling out support nationwide for the the Apple Pay mobile payments system in the fall. Apple CEO Tim Cook made the announcement during an earnings call Tuesday with investors.
Apple Pay continues to gain momentum. It is in use by tens of millions of customers daily, Apple says, with "well over" one billion Apple Pay transactions completed during the June quarter, more than triple the number during the same period a year ago. And Apple Pay now has more than 4,900 banking partners in 24 global markets, with another overseas market, Germany added soon.
A dozen transits systems in the U.S. and overseas also currently support Apple Pay or will soon, the company said.
For its part, CVS says about 7,800 stand-alone pharmacies will accept Apple Pay, quite a turnaround from Oct 2014, when the drugstore chain stopped accepting Apple Pay payments, over a conflict at the time with another mobile payments system called CurrentC, that eventually failed before it ever really got going.
CurrentC came out of a consortium of big retailers known as the Merchant Customer Exchange or MCX, which along with CVS, and 7-Eleven too, included names such as Walmart, BestBuy and Target. MCX was eventually acquired by JP Morgan Chase, which folded its technology into Chase Pay.
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