MCX postpones rollout of Apple Pay rival CurrentC, lays off 30, will focus on bank deals
As merchants like Walmart move aheadon their own mobile payment strategies, a consortium that once counted Walmart — along with a number of other big retailers and brands — behind it, has taken a step back.
Context & Ripple Effects
MCX was built on a simple bet: enough big retailers signing exclusivity deals could keep Apple Pay off their counters while the consortium finished its own wallet. That bet has been unwinding for a year — the limited in-store trial launched only as those exclusivity agreements expired, the launch then slipped again, and Brian Mooney was brought in as CEO to steady the effort.
Today's postponement lands just weeks before the scheduled end of the consumer beta, with all CurrentC accounts set to be disabled on June 28. Meanwhile the consortium's own members are hedging: Walmart is pushing ahead with its own mobile payments strategy, Target is developing an in-house wallet, and CVS has since shipped CVS Pay — leaving MCX's shared-app premise hollow even before this retreat.
First-order effects
- Thirty MCX employees are laid off immediately, and the beta user base is stranded by the June 28 account shutdown — the consumer-facing product is effectively dead while the company reorients around bank partnerships.
- Merchant members who honored exclusivity terms no longer have a consortium wallet to fall back on, so the counter they held closed against Apple Pay opens with nothing of their own ready.
Second-order effects
- Member retailers accelerate the shift to proprietary wallets — the pattern already visible in CVS Pay's rollout and Target's wallet development — trading a shared standard for apps each controls alone.
- Apple Pay faces less coordinated resistance at the register as exclusivity deals lapse without a replacement, strengthening its position in exactly the large retail chains MCX was designed to lock down.
Third-order effects
- The merchant-consortium model for payments looks structurally broken: if MCX's pivot to bank deals holds, retailer coalitions cede the wallet layer to banks and device makers while merchants retreat to store-branded apps for loyalty and data capture rather than interchange displacement.
- Regulators and card networks gain a clearer field as the most serious merchant-led challenge to incumbent payment rails stalls, reducing near-term pressure to renegotiate fees with organized retail buyers.
The trend: Retailer-owned payment coalitions are giving way to a split outcome — individual merchant wallets for loyalty and data, with banks and device makers capturing the actual transaction layer.