Apple Pay's Next Version Asks You for More Than a Card Number

Four changes, one direction

9to5Mac gathered the four on 27 August, drawing on Apple's own service announcements from June. Individually they read as housekeeping. Read together, they describe a payment sheet that carries progressively more of a shopper's identity, balances and rewards — and a company that is moving from processing a transaction to brokering the relationship around it.

The checkout screen becomes a wallet

The redesigned Apple Pay sheet in iOS 27 lets you swipe between cards rather than tapping into a list, and tapping a card opens a grid of everything in Wallet. More useful than the gesture is what the sheet now surfaces: rewards balances, debit account balances and pay-later options, shown at the moment you choose a card. That is a small change with a real effect. Card choice at checkout has always been made blind — most people pick by habit, because the information needed to pick well sits in a banking app they are not currently looking at. Putting a rewards balance on the payment sheet moves that decision to the point of sale. Whether your bank actually feeds those numbers to Apple is the part to check, because the field only appears for eligible cards.

Amex points: do the arithmetic first

Apple and American Express opened a route in June that lets Membership Rewards points pay for a purchase inside the Apple Pay flow. A "Use Rewards" option appears next to your balance, and points can cover all or part of the bill. The rate is where readers should slow down. 9to5Mac puts the redemption at 0.7 cents per point — 10,000 points for $70. That is below the roughly one cent per point that Amex has long offered for a straightforward statement credit, and well below what the same points are typically worth when transferred to an airline or hotel partner, which is the reason most people accumulate them in the first place. Paying at a till with Membership Rewards is the most convenient way to spend them and, on the published rate, close to the least rewarding. Convenience has a price here and it is legible.

Tap to Share inverts Apple Pay's founding promise

Tap to Share, due this autumn, extends Tap to Pay on iPhone — the 2022 feature that turns a merchant's iPhone into the card terminal. In store, a customer taps a participating merchant's iPhone and can share email, contact details, shipping address and loyalty information, watch the basket fill in real time, and pay from their own iPhone. The utility is obvious to anyone who has spelled out an email address at a till. The tension is just as obvious. Apple Pay's original 2014 pitch was that the merchant learns nothing: no name, no card number, only a device account number and a one-time code. Tap to Share builds a deliberate channel in the opposite direction. It is opt-in, tap by tap, and shoppers hand over the same data today by typing it — but Apple markets privacy as a product feature, and this is the first Apple Pay function whose purpose is to move personal data toward a retailer. Availability will be narrow at first for a structural reason: it rides on Tap to Pay, so it reaches only merchants who already use an iPhone as their terminal.

Reloading a debit card moves Apple up the stack

Later this year, Apple says, iPhone owners will be able to add money to a supported debit card from inside Wallet or during checkout. Apple has run a stored-value product since Apple Cash launched in 2017, but topping up a third-party debit card at the moment of purchase is a different posture — it puts Apple in the flow of funds rather than at the end of it. It is also the kind of function that attracts supervision. Balance top-ups and stored value sit close to the perimeter regulators watch, and Apple is already operating a payment business under scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic. The company has not said which banks or card issuers will support the feature at launch.

And Walmart, finally

The last item is not a feature. Walmart has begun accepting Apple Pay, starting in Arkansas, with a nationwide rollout promised by the end of the year; Sam's Club is included. It closes a standoff that lasted more than a decade, and it does more for Apple Pay's everyday usefulness in the United States than the other four items combined. We covered the announcement in Walmart Starts Taking Apple Pay on Monday, Ending One of Retail's Longest Standoffs.

What to watch

The redesigned sheet is already in the iOS 27 beta and ships with the release. Tap to Share is promised for the autumn, debit reload for later in the year, and neither has a date. The Amex rate is published and unlikely to improve. The single question worth tracking is how many retailers adopt Tap to Share — a feature that trades data for convenience is only judged fairly once shoppers see what they get back for it.

Sources

- Apple Pay is getting even better with four new features and more — 9to5Mac, 27 August 2026 - Apple unveils innovative features and intelligence experiences across services — Apple Newsroom, June 2026 - Apple Pay now lets you pay using American Express points — 9to5Mac - iOS 27 makes it easier to switch between Apple Pay cards — 9to5Mac - Walmart finally launching Apple Pay support next week — 9to5Mac