Square starts shipping its chip card reader with Apple Pay support; Samsung Pay now supports Chase cards
Square rolls out readers to accept Apple Pay — NEW YORK — Square is rolling out new mobile payment readers to 100 local businesses around the country, allowing such merchants …
Context & Ripple Effects
This shipment makes good on Square's summer promise of an Apple Pay-ready NFC and chip reader, moving from announcement to 100 local businesses actually taking contactless and EMV payments. The same news cycle has Samsung Pay picking up Chase card support, so both mobile wallets are racing to cover the two sides of a transaction: acceptance hardware on Square's side, issuing-bank relationships on Samsung's.
First-order effects
- The 100 pilot merchants can now accept both chip cards and Apple Pay from a single reader, closing the acceptance gap that kept wallet users defaulting to plastic.
- Chase cardholders gain Samsung Pay access immediately, giving the wallet a major issuer's card base without waiting on other banks.
Second-order effects
- Wallet adoption now hinges on hardware availability: Square's reader becoming a retail product — it later landed in US Apple stores at $49 [[a:864430]] — turns acceptance into an off-the-shelf purchase rather than a sales process, pressuring rival POS vendors to match NFC-plus-EMV support.
- Other wallets must chase equivalent issuer deals, since Samsung's Chase integration shows bank-card provisioning is the gating step for usable user bases.
Third-order effects
- Square's own trajectory shows where this leads: by 2016 its virtual cards worked with Apple Pay [[a:878799]], and in 2022 it shipped Tap to Pay on iPhone support [[a:983343]], eliminating the external reader entirely — acceptance migrating from per-merchant dongles to software running on consumer phones.
The trend: Contactless acceptance is steadily shedding dedicated hardware, moving from plug-in readers to software-only phone payments while wallets compete on which banks' cards they carry.