Will Apple Redefine How We Shop?

Apple stock rose over 2 percent on Monday as the company announced an increase of 13 percent in its quarterly profit, and sales of 39 million iPhones. And in a few days the company will roll out ApplePay, increasing the demand for the iPhone 6. Instead of a credit card, all people will need is their iPhone, which can be activated with a secure fingertip to prevent fraud.

South Koreans and Japanese have been using their phones as credit cards and train tickets for the past decade, but America has yet to catch on. Apple's entry into the mobile payment space is not the industry's first, but it might be the one that succeeds where others have historically failed. It is Apple's first of likely many iterations to transform the secure global payment processing and contactless point-of-sale transaction landscape, where people buy products by presenting their cell phones rather than by swiping credit cards.

Essentially, the phone sends out a communication within a very small space, about 12 inches or less. Can this be secure, or can thieves in a crowd pick up the signal as well? Will Google StreetView or other entities have the ability to receive and decipher the signals? The only way people will know is if mysterious transactions start appearing on their accounts.

From a purely technological standpoint, ApplePay is not yet redefining payment processing hardware. The near field communication (NFC) microchip technology embedded into Apple's new product lines that enables contactless point-of-sale transactions is not uniquely Apple. Google first introduced its secure payment processing through the use of NFC tags as early as 2010, with its own Google Wallet coming out soon after.

With over 220,000 merchants worldwide already accepting NFC contactless payment as a result of previous entrants like Google, one has to assume that the decision to use NFC instead of a more innovative contactless payment system is simply an initial attempt at targeting a more established market of merchant adoption. In the world of technology, NFC is already old.

Even after the death of former CEO Steve Jobs, Apple has always excelled at timing, with executive leadership able to recognize when the world is ready to handle something new. Apple may have a better payment system in the works, but the company may be just waiting for an opportune moment to roll it out.

Apple thinks it can do mobile payments systems better than Google. And others are taking note. Major credit cards and participating banks are signing up with Apple-from Visa and MasterCard to Bank of America and Chase. These payment processors are not happy about losing a percentage cut of every transaction to Apple. But they are more worried that the 39 million new iPhone users will leave them behind.

If consumer adoption is as successful as Apple hopes, the percentage these processors are losing on every transaction could pale in comparison to the business they could lose on a global scale. When my 89-year old father tells me he is upgrading to an iPhone 6 so he can use ApplePay, there must be something in it.

While a small number of notable retailers such as Walmart and BestBuy are holding out in favor of their own payment apps powered by standards like CurrentC, the vast majority of merchants are on board.

The payment space has been in need of a nudge for decades. Many have tried, but it seems all they may have done is prime the market for Apple to take the lead. With South Korea and other Asian and European countries ahead of America, and every day bringing another story of credit card hacking or fraud, it is time for a change.

Google Wallet's historically slow adoption has certainly been one of Google's most prominent failures. PayPal has also been inefficient at keeping up with the curve. Even with sizable year-over-year growth PayPal really only has been able to innovate through recent acquisitions such as the mobile payment company Braintree-the brains behind the popular person to person mobile payment app Venmo.

PayPal appeared to make an attempt at a contactless payment last year by introducing a PayPal Beacon product but then became relatively quiet on the subject ever since. Square, which turns a smart phone into a credit card reader, was initially off to a rapid start and primed to be an industry leader, but is now falling behind the rest.

Apple has a well-known history of delivering consumer products that effectively simplify a previously complicated process. Executives Tim Cook and Eddy Cue showed in their public rollout in early September just how fast and easy ApplePay is to use. Apple recognizes that these key factors increase consumer adoption, a core concept of their software development model. What Apple aims to do is to make mobile payments not just easy, but normal.

Americans are concerned about safety and privacy, and, with the hacking of celebrity photos on iCloud, Apple needs to regain some public trust. One breach on ApplePay, like the Target breach, could cause Americans to delay the entire system. But if security holds, Apple could be the company that changes how people pay.