Apple Just Added Another Way to Repay Your Friends
At Apple’s WWDC 2017, Craig Federighi (aka Hair Force One) announced some compelling updates to Apple Pay – upgrades that put it in direct competition with Venmo, Square, Facebook and Google.
Apple Pay now supports people-to-people money transfers exclusively through Apple Messages and will parse your messages to suggest when you should pay someone if it comes to how much you spent on a drink at McSorley’s (though, let’s, I think you know when someone asks for dough).
Peer-to-peer payment apps like Venmo , Square Cash, and even the Facebook Messenger payment service are platform agnostic , meaning you can send cash from an iOS or Android device, although you’ll need to convince someone to download and sign up for said service ( Square Cash only needs your bank card), which means you have to pull your credit card out again to sign up for the privilege of paying someone else. This is a barrier that Apple must not overcome, especially since, according to the company, its Apple Pay service is the number one contactless payment service on mobile devices.
Apple also has the advantage of a wider smart payments presence than its competitors. You cannot Venmo Home Depot or any of the more than 50% of US retailers supporting Apple Pay by the end of the year. Combined with the fact that most of the 800 million iTunes accounts have active credit cards attached, Apple Pay could soon become the de facto payment method for friends, just as the App Store was the gold standard for the app ecosystem.
Money sent and received via Apple Pay will be stored on the new Apple Pay Cash Card, which allows you to send that money to other people, use said dough to make other Apple Pay purchases, and, yes, transfer to your traditional bank account. This is an iMessage app that uses TouchID to authenticate a payment. It’s still unclear if you can send money to people who don’t use iOS devices, which could make drinking with friends a little more inconvenient if they’re on Android devices. On the other hand, you can always make new friends or convince them to buy new phones.
The service is certainly not perfect. There is currently no information on whether you can send or receive cash from groups of friends like Facebook Messenger, and there is no information on the fees associated with sending money through Apple Pay. You may already have a peer-to-peer payment system in your life, and that’s okay. Apple’s new payment service isn’t for everyone.