I understood that when Apple Pay was first released they had certain financial institutions that it was offered to. Community Banks were not a part of it. Has Community Banks now been invited to participate. Are any of you employed by a bank that is offering the Apple Pay? What is your opinion?

Contact your ATM, Debit, Credit card processor (s). Sign up is through MC and Visa- through the processors.

We are a small community bank in Northern Cal. We implemented Apple Pay in early December and I would recommend not jumping into it just yet. I was an implementation manager and the entire Apple Pay process needs a lot of transparency. IMO, none of the parties were and are ready for it just yet. We dealt with our processor (First Data) and Visa mostly during the implementation and there were and still are a lot of questions that remain unanswered. We did not have any contact with Apple Pay and some of the questions were not answered by our processor, as “they could not comment or answer on Apple’s behalf”.
One of the issues is business cards. In Apple Pay contract it clearly states that only personal accounts are allowed to be added into Apple Pay. When we raised the concern to FD and Visa, none of them were able to confirm or deny the statement, however when we withheld our business BIN from Apple Pay we were told that we have to add those, as we are required to let 95% or more of our card portfolio into the program. Documentation from our processor indicated that small business BINs are not excluded from participate. The concern is that if anything to go wrong, bank is the one who signed the contract with Apple and we will be held liable for any wrong doings.
Reporting of token provisioning is very basic and requires a lot of manual research in order to comply with Apple's client notification requirement. Visa requires quarterly report of all debit card sales involving token and our processor does not offer a single report on tokenization.
Apple does not have clear criteria on when tokens get activated and when additional authentication is required by Issuer before activation, and Issuer does not have a say in it.
Barely any merchants are accepting Apple Pay and even the ones that are accepting not properly educated on how to accept it, therefore leading to denial of the transaction.
And the bottom line in customer mind will always be that their bank is the one who does not have a grip on the situation.
My recommendation will be is to wait until the details are worked out between all of the parties; and parties are actually ready to offer tokenization, support it properly and provide with reporting.

Great feedback Natasha! First I've heard.

The 95% portfolio enrollment has been a sticking point for me as well. I haven't not been able to confirm whether we can separate out our credit portfolio from debit. Our Credit processor isn't able to suppport it on our BINs yet because they're shared.

It's my understanding tokenization for Android phones will be released shortly. I'm curious if they'll do a better job than Apple. Of course it's always tough being first!

Thank you for the feedback.

I am very interested in this portion of the post. It appears some banks are immediately sending an email or text notification when signing up to fulfill this requirement. If that is the case then that information can not be coming from a report that won't be delivered until the next morning. Where is the information coming from that allows the client communication announcing a successful enrollment into Apple Pay if it's not the 'Token Provisioning Activity Report' report from Visa?