Use Apple Pay At Starbucks, KFC, Chili's

(RTTNews) - How about paying for your Starbucks latte or KFC fried chicken using Apple Pay? Well, it will soon become a reality.

Apple Pay, Apple Inc.'s mobile payment and digital wallet service, will be accepted at Starbucks as a form of payment later this year while KFC and Chili's will follow suit next year.

Apple Pay will be rolled out for select Starbucks stores by the end of 2015 and expanded to about 7,500 company-owned stores in 2016.

In addition, KFC stores and Chili's Grill & Bar will make Apple Pay available in 2016 as a "pay at the table" model, Jennifer Bailey, the vice president of Apple Pay, said at the Code/Mobile conference Thursday. Bailey also noted that Apple Pay has been popular among Apple Watch owners.

Apple Pay's roll-out has been slow and has also failed to gain much traction, partly due to lack of acceptance at various retail stores.

The partnership with Starbucks, which has its own extremely popular mobile-payment application, is expected to provide Apple Pay with the much-need boost.

Apple Pay service was made available in the U.S. in October 2014. It supports credit and debit cards from the three major payment networks - American Express, MasterCard and Visa - issued by the top U.S. banks.

Starbucks' own mobile payment application accounts for 20 percent of transactions at the coffee chain's U.S. stores.

In mid-September, Starbucks had said its customers could use its mobile order-and-pay app to order from nearly 7,400 of its stores in the U.S.