At a recent payments conference, Mike Cook, head of Walmart’s payment business and a driving force behind MCX and CurrentC, took the opportunity (from the audience), to quiz Visa exec Jim McCarthy (on stage) about Apple Pay being afforded the lowest possible fee, the so-called “card present” fee.

Before you watch the video (part of this re/code article), a bit of background. As the name implies, card present means the credit card being charged is actually in the store, as opposed to the higher priced card-not-present fee that applies for typical in-app payments. The thinking goes, if the card is physically present, there’s less of a chance for fraud. EMV (mentioned in Jim’s first answer) is the chip part of the chip-on-card credit card solution.

There’s a lovely bit of human dynamic here. You get the sense that the people on the panel are used to Walmart’s Mike Cook grousing about Apple Pay, that this is all a bit of an inside joke at this point.

That dynamic aside, this is an excellent discussion of the primary issues faced by MCX. Why does Apple Pay qualify for the lower card-present rate when the QR-code solutions, like Level Up, do not? Obviously, the answer is security.