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Apple Debuts Apple Card To Transform the Credit Card Experience (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: iPhone users are already using Apple's Wallet app, Apple Pay, and Apple Pay Cash -- wouldn't they like an Apple credit card, too? The Cupertino company and bank partner Goldman Sachs believe the answer is "yes," so they've teamed up for Apple Card. In addition to offering major rewards for users, the new payment solution promises to improve the credit card experience by offering a healthier approach to spending. The Wallet app will include a more transparent list of transactions, organized in an easy to read format, plus a more flexible way of making payments on outstanding balances.
Apple Card is designed to complement existing Apple-branded payment options, as well as displacing other credit cards that might be in a user's wallet. Though the end goal is to increase Apple's share of the dollars spent by its users, the pinch this time will be felt by rival payment providers, and come with incentives for new card users. Every time you spend with Apple Card, you get 2 percent cash back -- a feature the company calls Daily Cash. Purchases directly from Apple come with 3 percent cash back.
Apple Card is designed to complement existing Apple-branded payment options, as well as displacing other credit cards that might be in a user's wallet. Though the end goal is to increase Apple's share of the dollars spent by its users, the pinch this time will be felt by rival payment providers, and come with incentives for new card users. Every time you spend with Apple Card, you get 2 percent cash back -- a feature the company calls Daily Cash. Purchases directly from Apple come with 3 percent cash back.
I was expecting nothing at all from the Apple Card, kind of just a throwaway thing.
But It really is way, way better than most other credit cards, and I say that as someone who has used a lot of different cards for different features.
The thing I like most about it in general is that it is actually for true customer friendly unlike pretty much every other card. I like prominent understanding of how much interest you'll be paying, about making payments not just monthly but more often not reduce interest. I like that there are not things like late fees meant to trap the unwary or the forgetful.
Then on top of that, not just 2% cash back (3% on Apple products/services) but you get that back each day and can use it for anything, not having to remember to navigate through an arcane web interface to make use of cash back credits (like with Spark).
The card itself as a physical manifestation looks great of course, but honestly what I am excited about is how much the way the Apple Card works could possibly start to change how other credit card companies behave....
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This was actually a fairly surprising and somewhat welcome announcement.
As a physical card, it's made of titanium and has nothing more than your name and the chip. No security code, no expiration date, no signature, etc. that can be copied or stolen. You get 1% cash back on everything you purchase with the physical card, it automatically redeems the cash back every single day, and the cash back is available to you for immediate use either as cash or as credit towards your statement. It also randomly generates a new credit card number for every transaction, ensuring that your card can't be used for anything beyond the transaction you're actively engaging in, and Apple apparently collects no information on you about where, when, or how much you're purchasing, while also requiring privacy by default (i.e. you don't have to write in to ask them to not use your info for marketing purposes) from their financial industry partners. There's also no late fees, overage fees, or other fees that you'd typically expect, and you can apply and get approved from directly within the app.
When used via Apple Pay either in-person, in-app, or online, the cash back goes up to 2% (3% for purchases from Apple), with all the same perks.
All of which is to say, they carved away some of the typical cruft and gave it a nice UI to try and make the statements easier to read (e.g. human-readable store names and locations instead of ALL-CAPS abbreviations) and they tried to make understanding payments easier (e.g. interactive calculations for interest payments).
Not sure that this will really change much in the industry, but it's a nice looking card, nonetheless.
I've tried Apple Pay a couple of times, but haven't succeeded yet
You must not try very hard. I use it regularly, without going out of my way to do so. Places I commonly use it include:
o Rite Aid
o Walgreens
o Shop & Save (grocery store)
o Giant Eagle (grocery store)
o Aldi
o Costco
o Duluth Trading Post
o Target
o Chick-Fil-A
o Ace Hardware
Plus I use Apple Pay Cash to pay babysitters and collect money from my father for money that he owes me. I even used it once to pay someone I owed money to in Canada - which worked because he still had his US-based cell phone. Very convenient (:
Kickback incentives to get people to use a payment brand should be treated as an anti-trust issue as sellers are effectively being held captive by perverse incentives on the back end. It's guaranteed suicide for many vendors to refuse to accept a known card brand.
Also there is no justification for bankers to extract percentages of every transaction for themselves in the first place. This is just a tax extracting value from the system for no benefit in return. Credit cards need to be phased out and banking systems improved to handle push based personal instant payments without transaction fees.
A company like Apple with a huge hoard of capital and something like a monopoly on its products soon begins to act and think like a financial services company.
There is too much risk actually innovating within its field, and because of its monopoly-like control over its products, it doesn't actually need to innovate. The risk of innovation is of course failing, and the capital it spent on the innovation project being wasted in comparison to some other use, such as holding T-bills.
Thus management stops thinking about product innovation and starts thinking about capital innovation, and usually this winds up being some kind of financial service business since it tends to have the same low level of risk as other highly liquid financial instrument, except with slightly higher margins.
My friend wants the Apple Card and justifies getting yet another credit card by saying that the average American has five credit cards. He only has one.
That's actually a really good reason. What if one is stolen? It's great to have a backup.
It also improves your credit score to have another account open, even if he never uses it.
Sounds like he's pretty smart about this, you should not ridicule him.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley