All right, so we decided we are going to try to do something a little bit different. Of course, you know me, I think at this point, I'm Drew Thomas. And for those of you who can't remember, but with me is my compatriot, my partner in crime, Jeff Matevish. Hello, hello. And you may, you may recognize Jeff's name from the end credits when he does all the extra production work on the full episodes of Bank Chats. But we found a really interesting article and we just decided to sit down and talk about it. Yeah, yeah. And so, so for all of us that have, have done this, we were having a discussion here that contactless payments, and let's talk about like Apple Pay and Android Pay and Samsung Pay, and every other brand out there that we are not endorsing, pay, and contactless payments with cards, do you use contactless?
You know, I, I don't but you know, now working at a bank I may get into it a little bit more. I came from a software engineering background, and you were always like, very skeptical of anything, technology that you weren't in control of. So, I can appreciate that. So, yeah, anything where I'm putting my information out that I don't know what actually is happening? I'm a
little skeptical. Yeah. I will say that, there's, I guess there's some legal drama going on with contactless payments, right. And you really only have Apple and Google that are, that are handling contactless from a smartphone perspective, not necessarily what is on your cards. Because like, there are contactless credit cards out there too. And yeah, debit cards and things like that. But I guess there's a lot of sort of hand wringing happening between whether or not Apple and Google have too much control over your contactless payments and how they work. And I will say, you know, I get both sides. You know, it is, it is a scary situation to start wondering like, well, if I'm giving my credit card information to Apple, what are they doing with it? And how is it being handled?
Right? So, you, you're a user, you're a supporter?
I am, a why, yeah, I am. I have to, I have to admit I am. But some of it is because I helped set it up for our bank. So, I got a really early introduction to Apple Pay and how it works. And ironically, right now, statistically, it is one of the most secure ways you can make a payment. I've heard that too. Yeah. Because it doesn't share any information with your, with your vendor. So, when a vendor gets hacked or something, your credit card information, like your card number, your, your CVV number, your expiration date, your name is not passed to that vendor. The, the Apple Pay converts it into a code key that is delivered to the vendor, the vendor delivers that code key to Visa, Visa says yes or no, and then it sends it back through the vendor, and it's completely anonymous. So, it's
tokenization on tokenization.
It is yeah, yeah. Talk tokenization Mr. Technology, what's tokenization?
Usually, you know, if you're doing some sort of like eCommerce, and you're storing credit card information that, that's hashed, you create a token, where it's encrypted. And you're, you're sending that encrypted data across to, you know, the end processor, I guess. So, Visa, MasterCard, Discover. That's right. So, it's completely encrypted, you know, it's safe, can't be intercepted, you know?
Okay. So, so I guess that's why like, when I look at this, and I say, well, when I use Apple, and first of all, I mean, I'm not endorsing Apple Pay, because Google Pay is very much the same, but I just happen to be an Apple owner. So, that's the one I'm most familiar with. But I don't want to say that there's anything wrong with Google's or Samsung's or any of the other kind of Droid versions of this. Yeah. But it's simple. I mean, it's just so easy to be able to use your thumbprint or your face or something, some biometric to prove that you are who you say you are.
And I think that's what scares me. That's the simplicity that if it’s if it's too simple, you know,
It’s yeah, but sometimes it's one of the things where, you have a voice assistant all through your house. I yeah, I do and so, so you can appreciate it's so complicated it's simple, right?
Yes. And that took me a long time too, to really use it. Yeah, I was, I was one of those you know, I'm never gonna have an Alexa or I'm never gonna have Google Home or anything like that. And you get one device and hey, that's pretty convenient. Yeah, and you get one for every room in your house and all of the sudden your lights don't work if they don't go off, if it goes offline. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, don't even worry about a power outage just the network outage is yeah horrific. Now see, I now see I'm in the same boat as you I have some of that stuff at home, but I have a lot of times I have switches that are connected. So that worst case scenario I can still use this switch even if it's not connected to the Wi Fi.
Yeah, well, and I have some fail safes too. most of my house is on uninterrupted power supplies. So, you know, even if I lose power, I can still watch that that movie and surf the web. So, that's interesting.
So, yeah, so you understand so complicated that it's simple. Yeah, that's when it comes, when it comes to money, I guess I'm a little more, you know, skeptical.
Yeah. Well, there's and you know, we could go into a whole big conversation about things like FinTechs and stuff too. But you could argue Apple is trying to become a fin-, FinTech is financial technology meshed. Right. So, you could argue that Apple is trying to be a FinTech at this point. Yeah. With their good, they have a relationship with, who I don't know, who does the credit card. Is it Goldman Sachs? That I don't know. I don't know, they have a credit card through, through some of the, one of the bigger banks. Okay. And, so it seems like they're trying to get to that point where they're doing more financial stuff, but, and trying to make it easy, but easy, doesn't always mean safe. Yeah. And so I get your point there.
So, this article about this subject by Craig Guillot, they're talking about, you know, Apple Pay, and Google Pay being the two top dogs, actually the only top dogs. Do you see that, you know, staying? Or do you see one of them becoming the top and the only contactless payment processor?
Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know. I mean, I can't see either one of them becoming the, the payment processor, because there's a pretty even split, I would say out there between Apple and Google, in terms of people who own phones. And they both have their strengths and weaknesses. Yeah. But I think if one of them was going to become the dominant, they would have by now like, there's enough, I think there's enough Android acolytes and enough Apple followers, yeah, to keep that separate. Whether you'd ever see a third or fourth, I don't know, because I think they both have such a head start. I don't know what you do.
Yeah. I mean, you don't even, well, look, we only have a handful of, you know, cell phone makers to begin with in the United States.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, and we're even seeing like, not that they're not the same, but even cellphone providers are getting smaller, smaller. I mean we got the big three now. I mean, T-Mobile acquired Sprint. Right, right. So, you got Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile. That's the, those are your big three. Right. And all respect to Ryan Reynolds, Mint Mobile is not...
Yeah, your wholesalers are, you know, getting smaller and smaller too.
Yeah. Now. But that kind of goes back to what you said about our little sort of side discussion about, about home assistants. I mean, you had a couple that you had, you had Amazon with, with Alexa that got a very early start. You had Google with the, the whole, you know, hey, Google, OK, Google, you know, Google Home, right, platform. And then Apple, one of the biggest technology companies, arguably in the world, wha-, if not the biggest technology company in the world right now, monetarily, came late to the party with Apple HomeKit, and nobody uses it. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, you get a head start. And all of a sudden, you're kind of out of that. But I don't know,
you know, like, it'd be a price point to I don't know, I'm not sure what the going rate for, you know, Apple HomeKit products are but could be, you know, yeah, it could be if it's like any other Apple product, it's it's, you know, significantly higher price than competitors.
Yeah. But I don't see that. I don't see how in terms of smartphone, I don't see how a third or fourth party gets involved with with NFC payments. I mean, even Google's, what's, what's Google's Pixel phone took a while to hang on. And the Amazon that's in contrast, and Amazon tried to get into the smartphone market with the, with their Fire Phone. Yeah. And it went nowhere. Yeah. So I think that I don't see a third or fourth party. I think that's, I think, I think the, the, the author has a point in the article that you're kind of stuck. You have you have Apple or Google as a choice. Yeah. Yeah, I have to agree with you. I don't see how you're gonna get somebody else in there. No. So, yeah, so, so these are, our little conversations are not a full episode. I mean, we're gonna wrap this up, I would say, you know, pretty, pretty rapidly here. But I think it's important like we can, we can grab some of these little articles and we can kind of talk about things when they come across, and we'd love to hear your feedback. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. You know, what platform do you use? Do you use, do you use contactless payments? I don't know. Yeah. That'd be interesting thing to talk about, the next time. Thanks Drew. All right. Don't forget, episode four is currently available, the full episode of, of Bank Chats is available and episode five should be coming out later this month. I'm excited about it. It's good stuff. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Jeff. Thank you Drew.