Officials at Commonwealth Bank are encouraging their customers who use i-phones to download the Apple Pay program that they recently made available. The bank is also in the process of onboarding merchants to the platform.
It took eight months for the bank to receive approval from Apple to offer the Apple Pay program. Vice President of Information Technology, Jevon McIntosh said, “Apple would not certify us unless they felt confident that the product would work with good success rate at the majority of merchants in the country. Fortunately, most merchant were already accepting contactless but it still was a process of validating that on behalf of the country.”
In addition to going through the validation process for themselves Commonwealth Bank had to ensure that other banks could also accommodate the Apple Pay platform. Commonwealth Bank President, Denise Turnquest expressed pride at what the bank was able to accomplish. She said, “we’ve worked hard to meet their standard and obviously to represent the bank as we would like also and we are just so happy and grateful to be able to provide the service to our community.”
According to Jevon McIntosh the bank intends to pursue validation to provide the Google Pay service. “We’re hopeful that Google Pay will open doors to the Bahamas market as well. We feel really strongly that they will and we’ll continue to kind of keep their feet to the fire and hopefully soon we’ll be able to make Google Pay available to our customers.”
