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TEXXR

Chronicles

The story behind the story

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A look at CurrentC, the clunky and creepy mobile payments app that Walmart, CVS, and other big retailers hope will help them sidestep credit card fees

CurrentC Is The Big Retailers' Clunky Attempt To Kill Apple Pay And Credit Card Fees  —  Long before Apple Pay, big brick …

TechCrunch Josh Constine

Context & Ripple Effects

In late 2014, Walmart, CVS and other big merchants threw their weight behind MCX's CurrentC, a mobile wallet built explicitly to route purchases through bank accounts instead of cards and strip out interchange fees. The launch posture was defensive from day one: CVS and Rite Aid reportedly switched off NFC at registers to shut out Apple Pay and Google Wallet while they prepared their own system. The reception was brutal — TechCrunch's takedown of the app as clunky and invasive traveled widely, picked up by Daring Fireball, Fortune, USA Today, ZDNet and others, with Daring Fireball framing NFC blocking as propping up 'a doomed rival.'

The arc since then has been one long retreat. Days after this piece ran, the pilot program disclosed a breach of participant email addresses; by mid-2015 the launch had slipped again (CurrentC might not ship until 2016); and in May 2016 MCX postponed the rollout entirely, laid off 30 people, and pivoted to bank deals. CVS, meanwhile, gave up on the consortium approach and launched its own CVS Pay app, while Apple Pay adoption at retailers like Whole Foods and McDonald's kept climbing.

First-order effects

  • CVS and Rite Aid customers lose tap-to-pay at checkout as the chains disable NFC to steer them toward CurrentC, an app requiring account registration and data sharing that early users publicly criticized.
  • MCX's merchant backers — Walmart and CVS foremost — take on the full cost and reputational risk of running a payments product themselves, with the email-address breach hitting pilot users within days of the app's public debut.

Second-order effects

  • Apple Pay's strong early traction at Whole Foods and McDonald's turns every CurrentC delay into free marketing for rival wallets, raising consumer awareness of Google Wallet and Softcard in the process.
  • With the retailer coalition stalling, the fallback becomes going alone or going to the banks — CVS building its own proprietary CVS Pay and MCX courting bank partnerships rather than shipping a merchant-only wallet.

Third-order effects

  • Merchant consortia are proving unable to match the UX and security cadence of platform wallets, pushing big retail toward fragmented, chain-specific apps rather than a shared interchange-bypassing standard.
  • If the pattern holds, the interchange-fee fight shifts from front-end wallet wars to back-end routing deals with banks and processors — the same fee pool contested through infrastructure rather than consumer apps.

The trend: Retailer-owned wallet coalitions keep losing ground to platform wallets like Apple Pay, forcing merchants into either proprietary store apps or bank partnerships in a grinding war over interchange fees.

Related: CurrentC · CVS · CVS and Rite Aid reportedly disabling NFC in stores · MCX postpones CurrentC rollout, lays off 30 · CurrentC pilot email addresses stolen by hackers

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