News

Merchants shut down support for NFC, as MCX looms

CVS and Rite Aid no longer accept Apple Pay, Google Wallet, or Softcard.

October 27, 2014

The Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) is still months away from officially launching its mobile wallet, CurrentC, but its mere existence has put some retail partners in a bad position with consumers as it relates to any NFC-enabled mobile-payment scheme.

CVS and Rite Aid, two MCX partners, not only killed support for the Apple Pay mobile wallet in the last few days, but also for Google Wallet and Softcard. Both chains switched off NFC support at their point-of-sale terminals. Between the two merchants, they have 12,000 locations across the U.S.

Although CVS and Rite Aid were never official Apple Pay partners, the scheme worked at those locations because their terminals supported NFC technology.

Rite Aid turned off NFC support 24 hours after Apple Pay became available to consumers with the new iPhones.CVS followed Rite Aid's actions, almost a full week after Apple Pay launched. CVS was an original Softcard supporter when the mobile wallet was known as Isis.

MCX launched CurrentC this past summer in what it called a private pilot mode in select locations nationwide. It plans to expand the pilot through the end of the year with regional and national rollouts in 2015.

"CurrentC will offer customers the freedom to pay with a variety of financial accounts, including personal checking accounts, merchant gift cards and select merchant-branded credit and debit accounts. Additional payment options will be available in the coming months," MCX said in the announcement about the CurrentC brand.

MCX CEO Dekkers Davidson is expected to give a keynote speech at the upcoming Money2020 conference in Las Vegas.