Re:Apple in Talks with US Banks to Develop Mobile Person-To-...
by alwillis on Thursday November 12, 2015 @02:10AM
(#10551741)
I think Apple could build a tremendous P2P service based on your comments. But it's never going to be the platform lock in they desire because if we really do have meaningful broad adoption of P2P only cross platform offerings will work.
Of course it could; for a growing number of people, the combination of Apple Pay, Touch ID and the iOS eco-system is already creating lock-in. If Apple were to create a P2P payment service that was secure and dead simple to use--kinda like Apple Pay--it would become the leading way to pay on the iPhone in a week or two.
Looking at the latest 10K, Apple sold over 400 million iPhones the past 2 fiscal years. Yes, that's a relatively small percentage of the global cell phone market, but that puts them at around 44% (and growing) in the US, so they could easily create an iPhone-only payment service if they wanted to. Even something that leveraged the fact that all Apple Pay users have at least one debit card in their Wallet app that could be used to send and receive payments.
Apple of course has the huge advantage of being the platform vendor and being able to make their payment app available to hundreds of millions of potential users literally overnight with a software update. None of these other guys--Venmo, PayPal, Square Cash--can do anything like that. And among these companies, Apple is likely to be way more trusted, especially among the 40 and 50 year-olds who not only have never heard of Venmo but wouldn't trust it with their payment information. Apple doesn't have that problem.
Of course it could; for a growing number of people, the combination of Apple Pay, Touch ID and the iOS eco-system is already creating lock-in. If Apple were to create a P2P payment service that was secure and dead simple to use--kinda like Apple Pay--it would become the leading way to pay on the iPhone in a week or two.
Looking at the latest 10K, Apple sold over 400 million iPhones the past 2 fiscal years. Yes, that's a relatively small percentage of the global cell phone market, but that puts them at around 44% (and growing) in the US, so they could easily create an iPhone-only payment service if they wanted to. Even something that leveraged the fact that all Apple Pay users have at least one debit card in their Wallet app that could be used to send and receive payments.
Apple of course has the huge advantage of being the platform vendor and being able to make their payment app available to hundreds of millions of potential users literally overnight with a software update. None of these other guys--Venmo, PayPal, Square Cash--can do anything like that. And among these companies, Apple is likely to be way more trusted, especially among the 40 and 50 year-olds who not only have never heard of Venmo but wouldn't trust it with their payment information. Apple doesn't have that problem.
Edit: I wrote about other Apple advantages in an earlier post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10550853