Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority says UK smartphone users could get new payment, ticket and travel apps if Apple widens access to the contactless technology inside the iPhone — and it wants the fees Apple charges for that access to be “substantially lower”.
What the watchdog is actually proposing
The CMA is consulting on measures that would require Apple to grant access to apps using Host Card Emulation, a widely used alternative contactless standard that Apple does not currently permit in the UK. HCE lets an app handle a contactless transaction itself rather than going through the phone maker’s own payment layer.
The regulator argues Apple’s present fees and rules are blocking financial technology firms from innovating and growing. Nearly two in five payments in the UK are now contactless, and nearly 60 per cent of people use a digital wallet — Apple’s being the most popular.
Apple’s answer
Apple told the BBC its current arrangements already let developers in the UK and elsewhere offer contactless transactions inside their own apps, covering in-store payments, transit passes, car keys and event tickets. The company said this “enables developers and banks to create innovative products and services… while ensuring users’ sensitive data remains protected by the highest security standards”.
Its objection is explicit: “We do not believe the CMA should require Apple to adopt an approach with lower privacy and security protections.” Last year it warned UK regulators against copying the EU, which forced it to open several technologies to rivals. The CMA’s reply is that, unlike the EU, it is targeting the interoperability of specific things — digital wallets and watches — rather than prising the platform open generally.
The numbers behind the argument
The CMA frames this as industrial policy. UK fintech generates more than £214bn in turnover and supports over 360,000 jobs, and the regulator says Apple’s rules are restricting that growth. It points to the EU, where opening the technology produced new businesses, and lists what could follow here: account-to-account payments, digital IDs, travel passes and digital keys.
Why this is worth watching from Dhaka
Bangladesh’s payments market is built almost entirely on mobile financial services — bKash, Nagad and the rest — and on QR codes rather than tap-to-pay. That is usually explained by card penetration, but there is a quieter reason: on iPhone, no local wallet has ever been able to use the contactless chip directly. A Bangladeshi MFS provider that wanted to build tap-to-pay into its own app simply could not, whatever its engineers were capable of.
So the thing being argued over in London is the thing that has kept the local market on QR. If HCE access becomes the norm in large markets, the technical barrier for a bKash or a Nagad tap-to-pay feature disappears; what remains is Bangladesh Bank’s rules and the cost of terminals, which are problems a local company can actually work on.
There is a second lesson, and it is the uncomfortable one. Britain has a £214bn fintech sector and a regulator with statutory powers, and it is still only consulting. A market the size of Bangladesh has no leverage of this kind at all. What small markets get is whatever large regulators win — which is an argument for watching the CMA and the European Commission closely, because their outcomes arrive here eventually, without anyone here having asked.
