Dive Brief:

• Chase Pay, a digital wallet the nation's largest bank launched in 2015, will be removed from all merchant apps and websites by March 31, JPMorgan Chase said Tuesday in a notice posted on its website.
• The bank announced in August 2019 it would shutter its stand-alone Chase Pay app in early 2020, instead focusing on embedding the Chase Pay button on merchant apps and websites. Tuesday's announcement suggests it is abandoning that strategy.
• "As technology has evolved, so has our strategy for integration at the merchant point of sale," JPMorgan spokesman Pablo Rodriguez told Bloomberg in an emailed statement. "We are incorporating the most popular features directly into the Chase mobile app and Chase.com."

Dive Insight:

Merchant acceptance of Chase Pay hasn't increased as the bank expected. Fewer than 1% of online merchants accepted JPMorgan's digital wallet as of mid-2019, according to a PYMNTS.com study. By comparison, about 40% of top retailers offer Apple Pay on mobile and 43% via app, venture capital firm Loup Ventures found in November.

JPMorgan launched Chase Pay as two other tech giants rolled out payment platforms — Samsung Pay and Google Pay (then known as Android Pay) also debuted in 2015 — to compete against Apple Pay, which launched a year earlier.

However, where Apple Pay has grown to account for about 5% of global card transactions — and is on pace to double that share by 2025, according to research firm Bernstein — Chase Pay has paled.

The bank is not afraid, however, to scrap projects and partnerships it feels aren't working — especially, it seems, fintech ones. JPMorgan shuttered its digital banking app Finn in 2019, about a year after its launch after feedback indicated millennial customers — toward whom the effort was aimed — didn't want a separate digital experience.

The notice posted on the bank's website Tuesday suggested consumers add their Chase cards individually to retailer apps and sites. It also supplied a link allowing users to link their Chase cards to their PayPal account, a partnership the two companies brokered in 2017. PayPal is accepted by about 70% of online merchants, Bloomberg reported, and perhaps more pointedly, is not named Apple.

The Chase Pay announcement also comes as JPMorgan hired a former HSBC executive, Jeremy Balkin, to serve as head of fintech and innovation for wholesale payments, Reuters reported Tuesday.

Balkin will be involved in JPMorgan's decisions to invest or partner with companies in that space, the bank said. At HSBC, Balkin led a team responsible for identifying new products and services and improving digital customer experience.