Apple's mobile wallet Apple Pay is winning over more U.S. households a year after its launch, but growth has slowed, research released on Monday showed. Fourteen percent of U.S. households with credit cards had signed up for the payment option by the end of September, up from 11 percent in February, Phoenix Marketing International said at a payments conference in Las Vegas. "A very rapid initial threshold was achieved by Apple Pay and it is still growing but the growth rate has slowed down," said Greg Weed, director of card performance research at Phoenix.

In June, two-thirds of the top 100 U.S. retailers told Reuters they did not plan to accept Apple Pay this year. In September we reported that Apple Pay was entering the last phase before entering China's market place. Whether Apple's CEO Tim Cook will shed any light on this tomorrow during their Financial Conference Call is unknown at this time.

Yet despite the latest research figures about Apple Pay from Phoenix Marketing Research, Apple's CEO Tim Cook reviewed the launch of Apple Pay in the UK during their last Financial Conference Call wherein he noted that Apple was adding more than 80,000 small businesses to Apple Pay every month.

Further, Cook noted that Universities and Colleges across the U.S. were now accepting Apple Pay and that by the end of 2015 Apple Pay will be accepted in 1.5 million establishments. So it's clear that statistics alone don't provide us with the whole picture in the case of Apple Pay's advancements. 

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