Visa Europe announces installation efforts for European Apple Pay terminals, cites mid-April completion date

It never hurts to have the infrastructure in place.

Visa Europe has announced that its European contactless payment terminals will support the tokenization service used by Apple Pay by mid-April. This would allow Apple to introduce Apple Pay to Europe anytime from this point on.

Tokenisation technology will be at the heart of new mobile payment solutions and has been hailed as one of the best data protection and fraud prevention methods available. The new service will be available for European financial institutions from mid-April 2015.

Although Europe has had contactless payment cards for several years, these currently transmit the actual card details to the terminal. Apple Pay, in contrast, transmits single-use codes which card companies can map back to the actual card, a functionality currently only available in the USA. As of mid-April, that functionality will be available in Europe too–at least for Visa cards…

While Apple has yet to announce a date for introducing Apple Pay to Europe, bank sources have suggested that the UK launch will be in the first half of this year. A job listing revealed last year that Apple had a London-based team working on rolling out the service across Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa.

Visa Europe has not confirmed that Apple will be using the service, but has strongly hinted that this is the case.

Visa had earlier announced plans to roll out tokenization for other mobile and online payment services, including Visa Checkout.

Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.

Via 9to5Mac and TheNextWeb