Integrated Payments and Why Apple Pay Isn't the Be-All and End-All

Rewards programs like these have different ways of integrating data with payments, which Apple Pay doesn't have (in addition to making the payment central to the experience). Apple Pay is shiny, it looks nice, it's fun, but it could have been made much more compelling to consumers and merchants, simultaneously creating incremental value, following the Starbucks model. There has to be a method that consumers can adopt easily. For example, it has to easily work with all smartphones and there needs to be some method of giving more value to both merchant and user than existing payment cards and systems are able to offer.