https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNXc-fvIItw
Apple Pay is the first mobile payment system launched by the Apple company and it enjoys enormous success in the USA, making mobile payments easy to make using a mobile terminal. Sofcard was founded in 2010 by mobile phone operators AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile as a mobile payment solution in the US under the name Isis (which was changed for easy to understand reasons), but it did not enjoy the expected success.
The three operators would have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the development of the system behind Softcard, but now the company could be bought by Google for only 100 million dollars. Softcard recently laid off 60 of its employees in an attempt to cut costs, so a takeover by Google is not that hard to imagine at the moment.
Softcard has created a base of 200.000 merchants in the US that allow NFC mobile payments using their system, and this is a good start for Google in the idea of competing with Apple Pay. The system is implemented at the largest retailers and is available for use on Android or Windows Phone, but of course not on Apple's iOS platform, because our terminals do not have built-in NFC.
Spending approximately 15 million dollars per day, Softcard did not prove to be profitable, so Google will most likely have to restructure it in order to support its activity. Softcard will allow Google to access a market segment in which it does not have such a good presence and will allow it to compete with Apple Pay much more effectively than in the past.
Apple Pay has proven to be an extremely efficient, probably profitable system, and Google needs a similar one to be able to give Android terminal users reasons not to leave the platform.
