Tim Day, who is AVP of digital channels at Navy Federal Credit Union, told CU Times he could not comment on the specifics of the credit union's Apple Pay contract or whether it plans to negotiate better terms. He did say Navy Federal intends to continue providing Apple Pay to members, however.

“We feel that offering all these different wallets, including Apple Pay, help our cards to maintain a type of wallet traffic,” Day said.

For many credit unions, Apple Pay likely doesn't generate enough transactions to warrant a discussion about better pricing yet, Grilli said.

“If Apple Pay was huge, as in like all of a sudden an issuer would start seeing — I'll go crazy and say half of all of their transactions being done through Apple Pay — now we might be talking real money. But because it's such a low level, a couple of basis points times a couple of transactions a month is still amounting to dollars, not millions of dollars,” he explained.

That's not to say things won't change. Merchants continue to add NFC-enabled terminals, and in-app use of Apple Pay is rising, not to mention the coming wave of wearable wallets, he added.

Plus, the onslaught of other “pays” may fuel more adoption of mobile and contactless payments, Grilli noted.

“Maybe that will serve to make it more muscle memory,” he said. “The more things that enable me to pay not in the traditional method of inserting or swiping my card in places, then the more it becomes ingrained in the way we pay and ingrained into the culture of the tech-first people who are going to adopt it.”

And of course, the added security of tokenized transactions could throw gas on the fire as well.

“Even though there hasn't been this mass adoption that's come in to Apple Pay, I still think that's the way we're going to end up. That's because it is the safest transaction. You see all these breaches and things like that in the news, and at the end of the day the thing that we need is the most secure transaction,” said Brice Mindrum, who is manager of the mobile services department at America First Credit Union, which adopted Apple Pay in 2014 and supports Samsung Pay and Android Pay. America First Credit Union, which is based in Riverdale, Utah, has $8.9 billion in assets and about 861,000 members.

Mindrum said the payoff from offering Apple Pay is less about financial returns and more about the member experience anyway.

“The awesome thing about us is we're a credit union. We're in it to offer the most awesome things to our members — the things that we think are the most benefit for them. And so for us, it's less about the ROI behind that transaction than it is about offering our members the best experience,” he said.

For now, Grilli said, renewing an Apple Pay contract is probably cheaper than letting it lapse and then trying to start everything up again later. Plus, it may be too late to walk away — the cat's already out of the bag.

“Members who have set up Apple Pay, who are using Apple Pay — why do you want to make them unhappy members?” he asked. “Why do you want to send out that clear signal that you don't believe in mobile payments, you don't believe in mobile wallets, you're not really into anything that has to do with the future?”