NEW YORK—The mobile payments battle is heating up as JPMorgan Chase has signed a digital wallet deal with Kroger.
Kroger, the largest U.S. supermarket chain, will begin offering JPMorgan Chase's Chase Pay mobile wallet in certain markets beginning this year, Bloomberg reported.
The partnership will be Kroger's first venture into mobile payments.
“Mobile payments have been slow to take off in the U.S. compared with other parts of the world as some merchants have balked at the higher fees associated with the technology and consumers have shown little interest in embracing it,” Bloomberg noted.
Only about 0.5% of customer transactions on Visa Inc.'s network involves tokenized technologies such as wearables, digital wallets and mobile phones, Bloomberg reported.
“With groceries, it’s a really key category for us, not only because of the volumes of transactions there, but because of the frequency,” said Tom O’Brien, JPMorgan’s managing director of Chase Pay, in the Bloomberg report.