Apple Pay now supports 90% of US credit cards in terms of purchase volume
Dozens More Companies Sign Up for Apple Pay — The list of companies working with Apple Pay continues to grow. — On Tuesday, Apple announced that in recent weeks the company had signed up dozens more banks …
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple Pay launched with a thin bank roster, but within months of launch Apple signed up dozens more issuers, pushing supported cards toward near-universal coverage of US credit-card purchase volume. That closes the biggest objection to the wallet — 'my card isn't on it' — before consumer habits had hardened either way.
The later trajectory confirms why this mattered: by 2022 Loup Ventures counted 75% of US iPhones with Apple Pay activated, up from 10% in 2016, and Tim Cook claimed 75% of all US contactless payments back in mid-2016. The bank-signing sprint of late 2014 was the supply-side precondition for those numbers.
First-order effects
- US cardholders at the newly added banks can provision cards into Apple Pay immediately, removing the enrollment gap that previously pushed them to plastic or rival wallets.
Second-order effects
- Banks outside the roster face a competitive disadvantage at the checkout terminal, pressuring holdout issuers to join on Apple's terms rather than negotiate their own wallet stack.
- Merchant acceptance becomes the binding constraint instead of card coverage, which is exactly the bottleneck later coverage shows Apple attacking through big-chain deals like Target and Taco Bell.
Third-order effects
- If issuer coverage is effectively total, control over the US contactless payment interface consolidates around whoever owns the phone's secure element — making Apple a gatekeeper between banks and their own customers, with pricing and data leverage to match.
The trend: Payments are migrating from a bank-controlled card network to a device-controlled wallet layer, where hardware owners like Apple sit between issuers and consumers.