Apple Pay is Now Available in Canada

Apple Pay is now available in Canada.

More than a year after its release in the U.S. and four months after it debuted in the U.K., Apple Pay is officially here.

Starting today American Express (AMEX) cardholders with an Apple Watch and iPhone 6 models or higher will be able to make purchases by tapping their devices on merchant terminals equipped with near field communication (NFC) technology and AMEX’s contactless payments system.

Apple and American Express said any merchant equipped with the AMEX system could accept Apple Pay, but did not disclose how exactly many retailers have the technology. Techvibes has learned that businesses such as Tim Hortons, Indigo, McDonald’s, Petro Canada and Staples, are equipped and ready for Apple Pay.

For Canadian users, Apple Pay can be set up on an iPhone by taking a photograph of their AMEX card. That information is then encrypted with tokenization security, which essentially hides a user’s credit card information and generates a unique “token” number so that the device and merchants never actually have real account data.

To pay for goods or services, a user makes and authorizes a payment by tapping an iPhone 6 model on a terminal while also pressing the fingerprint sensor.