What will Apple Pay cost when it lunches here - should Apple make it free?

While we all wait to learn the final terms of Apple Pay for UK participants, I would like to speculate on the choices available to Apple.

Apple takes 25 to 15 basis points out of the 1.25% fee that US issuers receive. Proportionally, their cut would be 4 or 3 bps out of a 30 or 20 bps MIF for UK issuers after PSD2. Hardly worth it, when European card issuers are hurting from a huge loss of interchange revenue, and each new payment standard creates another layer of IT, operations and support. HCE now provides a lower cost alternative for issuers. Apple has already developed and brought to market the technology for mobile payments and now their marginal costs to run the service must be negligible relative to the issuers'. If Apple does charge a high transaction fee then issuers should insist on being able to pass the Apple fee on to the cardholder – many Apple customers may be happy to pay for the privilege. Issuers could waive the fee for an initial period, which may get the pressure to build on Apple to waive their charges. Android Pay and Microsoft Pay, when it arrives, would have to follow suit.

As platform providers, Apple's and Google's job is to enable services to operate on their platforms – they don't charge telcos any bps for making calls and texts. Payments is not a business that Apple needs to get into. Apple sells devices and Google sells advertising, and they both could use the rich data stream that payments would provide. By the way, Apple should not be allowed to withhold payment data in the transaction message – issuers should surcharge any transaction that does not meet data requirements.

Simply, Apple Pay should be free - Apple needs payments to work on their devices much more than it needs the revenue stream from payments.

They may need to renegotiate their deals with Stripe though.