Apple Pay Competitor CurrentC May Not Launch Until Next Year
Jason Del Rey / Re/code :
Context & Ripple Effects
MCX's retailer-backed CurrentC has been the merchant world's answer to Apple Pay since late 2014 — the same window when Samsung was lining up LoopPay as another rival wallet. After installing former BoA Merchant Services chief Brian Mooney as CEO in April, MCX had lined up a limited in-store trial for this month, timed against exclusivity agreements that kept member retailers from accepting Apple Pay.
First-order effects
- MCX's member retailers — the big-box merchants backing CurrentC — face a decision point as their exclusivity windows lapse, with no live product to show for holding Apple Pay out.
- The trial timeline Mooney inherited on arrival effectively resets, leaving the consortium without a shipped consumer experience through the holiday season.
Second-order effects
- Samsung's LoopPay-based wallet and Apple's expanding ambitions — including reported talks with US banks on a Venmo-style P2P service — fill the gap CurrentC leaves open, hardening the platform wallets' lead among banks and consumers.
- Individual members start hedging: CVS ultimately built its own CVS Pay app rather than wait on the consortium, a template other restless members could follow.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward merchant consortia ceding consumer wallets to platform players and retreating to infrastructure plays — MCX itself later postponed the rollout, laid off staff, and pivoted to bank partnerships.
- If retailer coalitions keep fragmenting into single-brand apps like CVS Pay, mobile payments bifurcates into device-level wallets plus store-branded loyalty layers rather than a unified merchant alternative.
The trend: Merchant-led payment coalitions are losing ground to platform wallets as delays push retail partners toward their own apps or back toward Apple.