Apple Pay in Germany

At the launch, Deutsche Bank, N26, boon, HypoVereinsbank, Hanseatic Bank, Fidor Bank, bunq, American Express, Santander and comdirect took part (The Local). The savings banks and the cooperative banks were missing, because their own payment apps could not use the iPhone's NFC chip. Google Pay had started in Germany in June 2018, and about 820,000 terminals had been converted for contactless payments.

By December 2023, 99 banks in Germany supported Apple Pay, with Postbank as the last large bank in summer 2023 (CIO, in German). The same article cites a GfK survey for Mastercard from August 2023: 26 percent of Germans had paid with a phone or watch in the past twelve months, and of these mobile payers 40 percent used Apple Pay most often, 26 percent Google Pay and 20 percent the apps of banks and savings banks.

Apple Pay first carried only Visa and Mastercard cards. The savings banks joined at the end of 2019, added the girocard in August 2020, and from July 2021 their customers could pay with the digital girocard in apps and online shops through Apple Pay, the first time the girocard worked in e-commerce (Sparkasse MagdeBurg, in German).

For the girocard system this meant tokenization: the phone holds a device token in place of the card number, as on the network tokenization page. For merchants nothing changes at the till. A girocard paid with Apple Pay is a contactless girocard payment, under the same contactless rules, except that the phone's unlock replaces the PIN.

Germany added a rule to its payment services law in 2020: under Section 58a ZAG (in German), a company whose technical infrastructure contributes to payment services in Germany must give payment service providers access to it on request, through a standard interface and for a fee no higher than its costs.

The EU went further in July 2024. The European Commission made Apple's commitments binding: third-party wallets get free access to NFC on iOS in the EEA, users can choose another payment app as default for payments in shops, and the commitments run for ten years (Payments Industry Intelligence). The digital wallets page covers the license questions a wallet provider faces, and Wero is the European wallet built on bank accounts.

Finance Loop is the meeting place for people who bring cards into phones and phones to the till: issuers at banks and savings banks, wallet providers, acquirers and card schemes. It connects the finance, IT and AI communities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, with events in Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin and Hamburg.

Visa is an event and network partner of Finance Loop. At Capital & Code in Frankfurt, where Finance Loop is a media partner, Mastercard, PayPal and Worldline speak with AllUnity on the future of payments.

Yes. Since 2018 Apple Pay works at German terminals that accept contactless payments and in online shops and apps that offer it. Whether a card can be added depends on the issuing bank; 99 banks supported it by the end of 2023.

Yes, for banks that offer it. The savings banks were first, with girocard in Apple Pay from August 2020 and online use from July 2021.

Yes. Google Pay started in Germany in June 2018, half a year before Apple Pay. In the GfK survey of 2023, 26 percent of mobile payers in Germany named it as the wallet they used most.

The merchant pays the usual card fees to its acquirer. What the issuing bank pays Apple is a trade secret (CIO, in German).