ANZ feels customer boost from Apple Pay deal

It may be frustrating several banks in Australia, but Apple Pay has won over senior ANZ banker Matt Boss.

ANZ chief of products and marketing Matt Boss. Picture: AAP

It may be frustrating several banks in Australia, but Apple Pay has won over senior ANZ banker Matt Boss.

“I bet out of the last 300 transactions I’ve made, 294 of them have been Apple Pay,” Mr Boss, ANZ’s managing director of products and marketing, told The Australian yesterday. “I couldn’t even tell you where my wallet is right now as I look around my ­office. You just don’t need it.”

After ANZ in April broke ranks with rivals to sign up with Apple Pay, allowing customers to make contactless payments using iPhones, it yesterday revealed usage data for the first time.

ANZ claimed 20 per cent of the bank’s “eligible” customers — adults with a credit or debit card and an iPhone 6 or later to support Apple Pay — had uploaded their card details to the technology giant’s free digital wallet.

ANZ has about 5 million customers in Australia, while Apple has about 41 per cent of the smartphone market.

While declining to provide specific customer and transaction numbers, Mr Boss said engagement was “far-reaching”, citing customers spending up to $15,000 in one go and that more than 100 people aged over 80 were using the new technology.

From today, about 500,000 more ANZ customers will have the opportunity to use Apple Pay, as MasterCard is added alongside Visa and American Express.

This comes amid a heated battle between Apple and ANZ’s ­rivals — Commonwealth Bank, National Australia Bank, Westpac and Bendigo and Adelaide Bank — which have applied with the competition regulator to negotiate collectively with the US company on its payments service.

One of the main issues is the banks’ inability to use near-field communication hardware on Apple devices to enable contactless payments through the banks’ own digital wallets or banking apps, unlike Android phones.

ANZ has not provided financial details of its deal with Apple, but in the US the technology giant is thought to have negotiated a slice of banks’ “interchange” fees on transactions.

Mr Boss said the ANZ-Apple deal was done on the assumption bank customers would enjoy the functionality and the “great opportunity to do something differently than the other banks”.

“Long term would I like to put an ANZ wallet on the iPhone? Yes, I would. (But) when and if that happens our customers are going to choose which wallets they like best,” he said.

With technological change a major cloud hanging over banks’ outlook, Mr Boss said ANZ shareholders were benefiting from the deal with Apple by greater customer engagement for a tiny investment spend.

“From a shareholder perceptive we are still very pleased and happy with the decision that we’ve made and as we look at the business metrics we are really pleased with them,” he said.

“We’ve seen volumes come up quite a bit. We’ve also seen engagement of passive or disengaged customers come up. Last month, we had our highest net customer growth we’ve had in the past several years ... so there’s ­really good flows ... and real habit- forming behaviour take place with our customers.”