291–300 of 778 posts
It seems to me that Apple can offer reduced fees due to the fact that they'll have less fraud as a result of requiring touch/face ID for every purchase. While interesting, it doesn't come close to solving what I feel is the largest problem with cards in the US today -- interchange fees.
To the non-expert, what are interchange fees and why are they a problem?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple said they've engineered the service such that Apple does not know what you're purchasing or even what vendors you're shopping at. If Apple doesn't know this, they can't very well apply arbitrary rules to it.
What do they gain from offering the card if they are not harvesting transaction data? Is it possible that this is some legal gymnastics (i.e. Goldman-Sachs receives the 'Apple doesn't know' data and promptly send it over to them under an opaque 'we share information with our affiliates' clause)? It does seem like a lot of work and potential risk if the sole purpose is to increase user dependency on the Apple ecosyste…
Apple has been very focused on not being a big-data company. Any sort of back-end shenanigans would be so damaging to the brand of information safety that they have been building as to be unworth any potential profit.
It sounds like Apple's doing a lot of things very right with Card. I am curious when it's going to be available here in Germany.
I’ve found in the past Germans aren’t always keen on credit cards - they often push back when you try to use them in shops and restaurants and things like ticket machines at railways only seem to take regional debit cards. Trying to use an American Express gets a very bad reaction. Is that changing?
I don't thing it is healthy to have big entities like this control fundamental services like payment processing. How long before the opaque governance of the App Store is applied to their payments offering? How long before activists start making this a new vector for deplatforming? Apple also announced a news offering ( https://www.techradar.com/news/apple-news-plus ) and I think the same concerns apply there.
How does something like this work in Europe with no signature on the card? When I tried to use a US card without a PIN that I hadn't yet signed, a German checker made a fuss about the missing signature. This isn't a problem in the US where no one bothers checking the signature. What about a brewery I went to this weekend where neither swipe or chip was available for their POS and the card number was manually entered?
I don't thing it is healthy to have big entities like this control fundamental services like payment processing. How long before the opaque governance of the App Store is applied to their payments offering? How long before activists start making this a new vector for deplatforming? Apple also announced a news offering ( https://www.techradar.com/news/apple-news-plus ) and I think the same concerns apply there.
Look no further than the recent issue where Patreon competitor Subscribestar had payment processors Stripe and PayPal stop processing their payments for _political_ disagreements with the purported beneficiaries of the donations through the platform. PayPal said that it was actually one of the underlying payment processors, and it was suspected to be MasterCard. That incident was the first time I've ever taken the ne…
I hope this is expanded beyond the US. I would get in a heartbeat; if Apple can expand this offering to Europe and other parts of the world with very little use of credit cards they will be able to create new business at a massive scale.
The problem is credit card business in US is a)much more profitable due to significantly higher interchange fees and b)credit cards adoption is much higher.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do they gain from offering the card if they are not harvesting transaction data? Is it possible that this is some legal gymnastics (i.e. Goldman-Sachs receives the 'Apple doesn't know' data and promptly send it over to them under an opaque 'we share information with our affiliates' clause)? It does seem like a lot of work and potential risk if the sole purpose is to increase user dependency on the Apple ecosyste…
They get a percentage of every transaction (small, but it is about the aggregate for them). Mostly for Apple this is about pushing people who are using ApplePay to back it with a credit card that Apple gets a piece of, rather than the one you already have a piece of. So they get the small chunk from being in the loop with ApplePay, and now a small chunk from being the sponsor of the card. Apple has been very focused…