NFC Times Exclusive Insight – Payment network Discover Financial Services announced its support for Apple Pay on Monday, becoming the fourth major payment networks in the U.S. to join Apple Pay.

Discover had said in November 2014 that it was in discussions with Apple to join Apple Pay. It is not clear why the deal took so long to finalize, and the service still won’t be available until this fall, a full year after Apple Pay launched with the three largest U.S. networks, Visa, MasterCard Worldwide and American Express.

Troy Bernard, global head of advanced payments for Discover, told NFC Times in late 2014 that Discover was finishing coding work on a tokenization service, which it then planned to have ready for issuers this month, April. Discover was also expected to launch with a related service provider-TSM for markets where secure elements will be used for NFC payments rollouts.