US retail giant Best Buy has opened up about its experience with Apple Pay, its ongoing support for retailer-led consortium MCX’s CurrentC mobile payment service and its view on Chase Pay, the QR code-based service launched earlier this week.

“I think we had relatively modest expectations,” the retailer’s SVP of loyalty and financial services Mark Williams told a conference session discussing Apple Pay at Money20/20. “We’re seeing relatively minimal volumes, but that’s what we were expecting in the early days. Apple were the first and the boldest with a very slick solution for the consumer.

“They put their toes in the water — now, it’s time to build on that and go deeper to make it an unmissable transaction for the consumer. We’re a very proud founding member of MCX first of all. We prefer MCX above all the other players but, generally, we want our customers to choose. MCX is a fantastic customer solution because it’s not platform dependant.”

“There’s a reason why we wanted to partner with Chase Pay,” Williams continued. “Retailers run very, very small margins, especially a retailer like Best Buy — our margins go down every single year and someone coming in and actually giving us price discounts instead of increases is a very compelling story for us.

“NFC is a little bit dated now in what it can do. We think that it [QR code] is the better form factor for us to deal with. We are already enabled to do that transaction.”

“Apple Pay has the first mover advantage and the first mover disadvantage,” Williams added. “I think they came out with something that hit the needs of mobile payments. They had a good window. The [iPhone] 7 will bring Apple Pay to life. Then Android and Samsung will play catch up again. That’s great for consumers.”

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