If you’ve bought lunch at a hawker stall in Singapore lately, there’s a good chance the cashier already takes cards and mobile wallets without blinking. Now imagine that the cashier — or the stall owner — doesn’t need a separate card reader at all. Apple’s Tap to Pay on iPhone, which turned on in Singapore this week, does exactly that: it turns a compatible iPhone into a contactless payment terminal, so merchants can accept contactless cards, Apple Pay and other digital wallets just by opening a partner app and holding the phone out.

The feature isn’t a third-party add-on; it’s a built-in capability of iOS that relies on the iPhone’s NFC radio and Apple’s existing payment stack. In practice, a merchant opens a supported payments app, types or confirms the amount, presents the iPhone to the customer and the customer taps a card, Apple Watch, or another phone to complete the sale. Apple says transactions are encrypted and processed using the Secure Element, the same secure tokenization tech that underpins Apple Pay — a point the company leans on heavily when it talks up privacy and data minimisation.

Not every iPhone can do this: merchants need an iPhone Xs or later and a payment app from one of Apple’s partner platforms to enable Tap to Pay. At launch in Singapore, the first platforms offering the capability are Adyen, Fiuu, HitPay, Revolut, Stripe and Zoho, with Grab — the region’s dominant super-app — slated to join early next year. Those partners are where the money actually moves: they handle settlements, fees, reporting and extras like invoicing or loyalty integration, so Tap to Pay plugs straight into the commercial plumbing merchants already use.

For merchants, this is as much about convenience as cost. The obvious pitch is that you can skip buying or renting a countertop terminal or a dongle — which lowers the barrier for seasonal vendors, mobile kiosks, freelance tradespeople and other small operators who want to start accepting cards fast. But the practical upside goes beyond hardware savings: because the payment flow sits inside an app, staff can roam the floor, serve customers in line, or check out a queue without a dedicated register. Local coverage of the launch emphasised that flexibility for hawkers, pop-ups and micro-retailers who’ve been steadily upgrading to contactless and QR payments over the last few years.

That flexibility is important in Singapore’s payments landscape. Regulators and industry bodies here have for years nudged the market toward interoperability and less cash dependence — think unified QR standards, campaigns to bring hawkers online, and steady public investment in digital payments infrastructure. Contactless and mobile wallet usage is already mainstream in the city-state, so Tap to Pay on iPhone is arriving in a market that’s already comfortable with the “tap” moment. It’s also part of a wider rollout: Apple says Tap to Pay has now reached roughly 50 countries and regions, and Singapore is the latest stop.

Security is the headline defence Apple uses to sell Tap to Pay to regulators, payment networks and nervous merchants. The company points to the Secure Element and tokenization — card numbers aren’t exposed to the merchant and Apple says it does not get a record of what’s being bought. The system also supports PIN entry on the merchant’s device for transactions that require it, with accessibility options so customers with assistive needs can enter their PIN independently; Apple and its partners design the flow to block screenshots, recordings and background sensors while PIN entry is active. Those protections are designed to make the phone behave, from a security and compliance standpoint, like a traditional EMV-capable terminal.

But convenience invites complexity. Turning phones into terminals expands the universe of devices that must be kept secure and audited — a worker’s personal handset with a cracked screen and outdated OS is not the same as a purpose-built countertop terminal that gets routine firmware updates and stands behind a counter. The merchant-platform layer will carry much of that burden: onboarding checks, firmware and app minimums, dispute handling and anti-fraud controls. How different providers price Tap to Pay — per-transaction fees, rolling monthly charges, or bundled merchant services — will shape who adopts it and how fast.

There’s also the customer psychology piece. For buyers, interacting with someone else’s phone to pay may feel odd at first, especially when it involves handing the device over or holding a card to a palm. But Apple is betting the experience will quickly normalise, just as chip-and-PIN did a decade ago and contactless did more recently: when the tap is fast, friction drops and conversion rises. For merchants, the real metric will be whether Tap to Pay actually speeds transactions and simplifies back-office work, rather than merely replacing one card reader with another device.

From a competitive angle, Apple’s move deepens the company’s presence on both sides of the checkout counter. The iPhone has long been the customer’s wallet; now Apple wants it to be the merchant’s register, too. That shift matters to payments platforms and banks because it concentrates more of the in-person experience on Apple’s hardware and software guardrails — and because each integration is a nudge for merchants and consumers to prefer iOS-friendly flows. Whether that translates into materially different economics for banks, acquirers and fintechs depends on how interchange, fees and partner deals land locally.

For everyday businesses in Singapore, the rollout is immediate and pragmatic: if your shop uses one of the supported platforms and your staff carry iPhone Xs and newer devices running the right iOS, you can flip on Tap to Pay and start taking contactless money at once. For the broader payments ecosystem, the roll-out is another test: can Apple’s software-first approach scale into dense, low-margin environments — hawker centres, pop-up markets and small service businesses — without creating new security gaps or leaving certain kinds of merchants behind? The answer will shape how quickly phones become as common at the checkout as the plastic card itself.

At the end of the day, Tap to Pay on iPhone in Singapore feels like a small technical change with potentially big consequences. It strips a physical barrier off payments and folds more of the checkout into the apps merchants already use. For a country that was already fast to adopt contactless, the upgrade may arrive quietly — another invisible convenience — until one morning you find the person in front of you at the stall paying by tapping someone else’s phone and you realise the tills have already changed.