Apple on Tuesday announced that it will release a new feature Tap to Pay for the iPhone that will allow consumers to buy stuff from the choice of their merchants by tapping their phones together.
The announcement turns iPhones into point-of-sale (POS) terminals without extra hardware.
Apple announced that Stripe will be the first payment operator to provide this service, and that will be integrated into Shopify’s POS product.
The service will be currently limited to the U.S and it will use the NFC chip of the iPhone, and it will also accept Apple Pay, American Express, Visa, Discover, and Mastercard.
Tap to Pay is Apple’s recent financial services innovation.
Apple reported revenue of $68.43 billion in services for the financial year ended in September. Apple Card and Apple Pay are a small part of that segment.
Apple mentioned that a new Tap to Pay feature will be accessed through third-party applications, and will be released officially later this year.
Other payment firms and application developers will be able to develop applications that can access a new Tap to Pay feature in a coming version of the iPhone operating system.