Not to be outdone by rival Stripe, Braintree announces Apple Pay support
Yesterday was a huge — huge! — day for Apple, as it unveiled new and bigger phones, its first smartwatch, and a new wireless, NFC-based payments system: Apple Pay. — Apple announced a long list of financial …
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple used its September 9 event not just to launch new iPhones and its first smartwatch but to put itself at the center of checkout with Apple Pay, an NFC-based payments system announced alongside a long list of financial partners. Stripe walked away from that announcement as one of the named launch integrators, and the pickup across Re/code, Bank Innovation, ReadWrite and others shows how quickly the story became a competitive marker for payment platforms.
Braintree's response came fast: within two days it announced its own Apple Pay support, explicitly framed as matching Stripe rather than waiting out the hype cycle. The playbook echoes 2011, when Apple's retail moves were already reshaping payment startups' fortunes — Square's retail boost from Apple showed then that an Apple endorsement could re-rank the whole category overnight.
First-order effects
- Braintree's merchants gain access to Apple Pay through their existing integration, and Braintree neutralizes the launch-partner advantage Stripe held from Apple's September 9 announcement before it could translate into merchant switching.
- Stripe's head start lasts days, not quarters — both platforms can now market the same NFC-based checkout, so Apple Pay stops being a differentiator between the two.
Second-order effects
- With the two leading developer-facing platforms at parity on Apple Pay, competition shifts to execution — tokenization handling, fraud tooling, and how quickly each can onboard the banks Apple is adding to the system.
- Other gateway and processor players face pressure to announce equivalent support or explain why their merchants will be last to offer Apple's wallet at the point of sale.
Third-order effects
- If wallet support becomes a check-box every major payments platform ships within days of a launch, the durable value in the stack migrates toward whoever controls the consumer-side credential — Apple here — while processors compete on plumbing and price.
- The pattern points toward Apple using partner selection as a lever over the payments industry's structure, deciding which platforms get early access and forcing the rest into catch-up cycles around each new capability.
The trend: Mobile wallet compatibility is collapsing from a strategic differentiator into a standard line item in payments-platform APIs, with Apple's launch-partner choices setting the tempo.