Interesting that the list of banks is nearly the same as that of ApplePay. I'm glad there are some forward-thinking enough banks willing to push technology forward.
Implementing Apple Pay isn't a technical feat. There's a standard for it.[1] As long as the banks let you access their token generation service, it's straightforward. However, I haven't heard of anyone other than Apple getting that permission. It'll happen soon enough, but the chances that these guys are the first seems slim to me.
I think it might be a bit of a misrepresentation. They will have their own 3rd party payment service ala paypal but you will be able to use the card to decide which payment method associated with that account gets used.
Just a guess! but it would avoid some pretty massive technical hurdles to international acceptance.
As far as the current public information goes, Apple Pay tokenizes your credit/debit card and uses that to pay, which means your bank processes the payment. Apple won't process the payments themselves.
The card connects to your iPhone (for proximity detection) perhaps the card accesses Apple Pay on your phone when making the transaction therefore your phone needs to be in your pocket while inputting the chip and pin? Just a thought.
My point was that there are banks that will never adopt new technologies, then there's the likes of AmEx, Chase, Wells Fargo, etc, who have now signed on to two different (and to a certain extent, competing) technologies that they don't have to adopt, only because it pushes the industry forward.
But yeah, they obviously found a way to implement ApplePay - hell, Apple probably did it for them.
