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Pakistani immigrant Ahmer Ali Khan is one of seven people behind tech giant Apple’s latest innovation “Apple Pay”, which promises to revolutionize the way consumers purchase products.
Thirty-eight-year-old Khan hails from Rawalpindi and had moved to Silicon Valley in 2000 after graduating from the Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology, Newsweek Pakistan reported. He worked at several smaller tech gigs and startups before he first attempted building a near-field, cell phone based-payment in the now-defunct ViVOtech.
He was hired by Apple in 2011 to work on their “top secret” payment system with applications in banking and in retail. In February this year, Khan and his colleagues applied for a patent for what eventually came to be known as Apple Pay, an application which “will forever change the way all of us buy things”, as Apple CEO Tim Cook put it in Cupertino during the launch of the technology, along with the new Apple Watch, iPhone 6 and t he iPhone 6 Plus.
Khan currently lives along with his wife and two children in Milpitas, California.
According to Apple’s officials, “With Apple Pay, instead of using your actual credit and debit card numbers when you add your card, a unique Device Account Number is assigned, encrypted and securely stored in the Secure Element, a dedicated chip in iPhone and Apple Watch. These numbers are never stored on Apple servers. And when you make a purchase, the Device Account Number alongside a transaction-specific dynamic security code is used to process your payment. So your actual credit or debit card numbers are never shared by Apple with merchants or transmitted with payment”.
