JPMorgan Chase is pulling the plug on its Chase Pay digital wallet about a year after discontinuing the standalone app.
The option to transact using Chase Pay will be removed from all merchant websites and apps by the end of the month, according to a
“As technology has evolved, so has our strategy for integration at the merchant point of sale,” JPMorgan spokesman Pablo Rodriguez said in an emailed statement. “We are incorporating the most popular features directly into the Chase mobile app and Chase.com,” including paying with points and logging receipts.
It’s a quiet end for a product that was introduced with a lot of fanfare back in 2015, when the bank unveiled Chase Pay before an audience of thousands at the Money 2020 conference. At the time, Apple Inc. had recently debuted Apple Pay and payment networks Visa, Mastercard and American Express were all pushing payment buttons of their own.
For JPMorgan, the goal was to speed adoption of its digital payment systems and challenge rivals. But the effort never really took off.
By 2019, the bank said it would discontinue the smartphone app used to make payments at brick-and-mortar stores. Customers, it turned out, still preferred to use physical cards when paying in person. At the time, JPMorgan said customers would still be able to use Chase Pay on the websites and apps of retailers that accepted it.
Merchants have increasingly looked to simplify the checkout process, with many slimming down the number of payment options on their pages. Especially with more and more consumers making purchases on mobile phones with small screens, the fear was that payment-option overload was causing people to abandon their electronic shopping carts before checking out.
JPMorgan is “working closely with our merchant clients on ways to integrate our digital experiences within their own respective sites,” Rodriguez said.
The bank is encouraging customers to add their Chase-issued credit and debit cards to their PayPal accounts as well as shopping sites and apps, according to the notice.
