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Apple in Talks with US Banks to Develop Mobile Person-To-Person Payment Service

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Re: Apple in Talks with US Banks to Develop Mobile Person-To-Person Payment Service

#171

Post by forumuid »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #149
flyrain wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In China, it is also very convenient to send money by cellphone by scan some code. It's that easy.

I presume you're talking about WeChat or AliPay payment. The US has equivalents, but they're not as advanced. The closest US equivalent to WeChat payment is Venmo. But I can use WeChat to pay in McDonald's, not just to send money to friends. The closest US equivalent to Alipay is Paypal. But with Alipay I can not only pay for online purchases and pay utility bills, I can also see a list of utility bills I have yet to…

Alipay has a interesting and convenient feature named Acoustic Payment,which support Person-To-Person payment through mobile phone's Speaker

Re: Apple in Talks with US Banks to Develop Mobile Person-To-Person Payment Service

#172

Post by admiralpumpkin »

nicolewhite wrote: post #122
braythwayt wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to give my children their allowance? Or transfer money back and forth with my partner?

You can do this easily with Square Cash and Venmo already.

As someone who has used both extensively, they both could use improvement.

Venmo is a holding service, requiring an extra step to actually get your money.

Square Cash, while easy and directly person-to-person, is slow.

Fix either of these issues and I'll convert.

Re: Apple in Talks with US Banks to Develop Mobile Person-To-Person Payment Service

#173

Post by ap3 »

MBCook wrote: post #58
BillinghamJ wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps Apple Music (launched on Android today) is a sign of changing times?

I doubt it. I think Apple Music is a trojan horse (much like the original iPod) to get people using their music service. They MAY release the payment stuff for Android (so users can receive payments) but I doubt they want to be a general payment provider for Android users.

What about android users that already have iTunes accounts via the Apple Music trojan horse ?

Re: Apple in Talks with US Banks to Develop Mobile Person-To-Person Payment Service

#174

Post by rahimnathwani »

seekingcharlie wrote: post #155
rahimnathwani wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"In Australia, you can make a free transfer entirely from web/app and it will be received, often the next day." In the UK or China, it's minutes/hours, as long as you do the transfer before a certain time.

Sorry, should edit that - it's immediate for us in Australia if you have transferred to a certain person before OR if you use the same bank. It's the next day for external banks / people that you haven't transferred to before.

"It's the next day for external banks / people that you haven't transferred to before."

OK - so you're still a touch behind the UK and China ;)

Re: Apple in Talks with US Banks to Develop Mobile Person-To-Person Payment Service

#175

Post by alwillis »

Alupis wrote: post #32
matthewmacleod wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, do bear in mind that the iPhone is pretty popular – so you've probably got a decent chance of wanting to transfer money to someone with a compatible device – maybe 25% or so? Knowing Apple's UX, it'll be rather easy-to-use if it's available – so I'm not sure that the overhead of 'figuring out if the other person uses an iPhone' would be any higher than figuring out if they use Venmo or PayPal or Square or whate…

> Knowing Apple's UX, it'll be rather easy-to-use How can we assume this? This exact thing has been tried many, many times - and sometimes to great success. What inherently makes you believe Apple's spin will be so much better than the other services and their unique problems? The challenge Apple will face has nothing to do with UX - it will have to do with userbase. It's likely (although not absolute) that using thi…

Given Android devices far outnumber iOS devices, this may pose a problem. Other services like PayPal and Square are universal services (device agnostic), and accounts are free (compared to Apple's barrier to entry which will likely cost you an iOS device).

In the US, where this payment service would likely be available first, the iPhone has a marketshare of around 44% and growing. So the difference in marketshare is in the single digits: http://www.macrumors.com/2015/09/03/iphone-us-market-share-c...

Apple sold 74.5 million iPhones this quarter a year ago; they could sell even more this year, given the start the iPhone 6s had this year (13 million) vs. last year (10 million) during the first weekend of availability. If this keeps up, iPhone marketshare could surpass Android in a couple of years or less.

Second, just like with iMessage, Apple could differentiate between iOS users (blue bubbles) and non-iOS users with their green bubbles. Yes, this is a real thing: "It’s Kind of Cheesy Being Green" https://medium.com/message/its-kind-of-cheesy-being-green-2c...

The easiest thing for users would be to include payment in iMessage, similar to what Facebook and others are doing with their messaging apps.

Blue bubbles only. ;-)

Re: Apple in Talks with US Banks to Develop Mobile Person-To-Person Payment Service

#176

Post by greggman »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #84

The US is so archaic in banking I'm not surprised that it takes Apple to do something about it, a shame. I'm still sending a paper check to the landlord every month, ha! What is this, the 70's? The rest of the world already has direct, often immediate, free money transfers a few clicks away, and for a long time. We should focus there, rather than inserting more middle-men. When I was in New Zealand, we even paid for…

I haven't sent a paper check since about 1991 when I started using Bill Pay which AFAIK is part of nearly every bank in the USA now and has been for many many years. Not sure why you're sending checks manually. The bank decides if it's a transfer or a check. I don't care because to me it's been trivial for 24 years.

Compare to Japan where I had to transfer to my landlord at about $6 per transfer and doing online didn't happen until about 2003, 12 years after the USA.

Re: Apple in Talks with US Banks to Develop Mobile Person-To-Person Payment Service

#177

Post by mixmastamyk »

greggman wrote: post #176
mixmastamyk wrote: post #84

The US is so archaic in banking I'm not surprised that it takes Apple to do something about it, a shame. I'm still sending a paper check to the landlord every month, ha! What is this, the 70's? The rest of the world already has direct, often immediate, free money transfers a few clicks away, and for a long time. We should focus there, rather than inserting more middle-men. When I was in New Zealand, we even paid for…

I haven't sent a paper check since about 1991 when I started using Bill Pay which AFAIK is part of nearly every bank in the USA now and has been for many many years. Not sure why you're sending checks manually. The bank decides if it's a transfer or a check. I don't care because to me it's been trivial for 24 years. Compare to Japan where I had to transfer to my landlord at about $6 per transfer and doing online didn…

Didn't say I did it manually, yes I use bill pay in this case and when I can. But, paying robots to print, mail, and deliver checks is still ridiculous when the internet exists. Not to mention the other end where the guy (I send them to a guy) deposits them.

Re: Apple in Talks with US Banks to Develop Mobile Person-To-Person Payment Service

#178

Post by rahimnathwani »

forumuid wrote: post #171
rahimnathwani wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I presume you're talking about WeChat or AliPay payment. The US has equivalents, but they're not as advanced. The closest US equivalent to WeChat payment is Venmo. But I can use WeChat to pay in McDonald's, not just to send money to friends. The closest US equivalent to Alipay is Paypal. But with Alipay I can not only pay for online purchases and pay utility bills, I can also see a list of utility bills I have yet to…

Alipay has a interesting and convenient feature named Acoustic Payment,which support Person-To-Person payment through mobile phone's Speaker

Wow. This is pretty cool. In the English version on Android, it's called 'Sound Pay'. When activated, it makes a repeated 'shoop shoop-shoop-shoop' sound, whilst it scans for other devices in the same mode.

Re: Apple in Talks with US Banks to Develop Mobile Person-To-Person Payment Service

#179

Post by alwillis »

jusben1369 wrote: post #83
MBCook wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My whole family and many of my friends use iPhones. iPhones are extremely secure thanks to TouchID and Apple's software. Apple already has payment info for me and a good relationship with banks. They're normally pretty great at UI and can integrate it into the OS in ways no 3rd party ever could. It will be built into the phone and come preinstalled so I don't have to convince people to install it. Apple shows a lot m…

No disrespect but you didn't answer OP's question. Instead you went on with a bit of an advertisement about how great Apple is. Venmo has cracked this potential market (per the article they have great market share) 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 cro…

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.

Edit: I wrote about other Apple advantages in an earlier post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10550853

Re: Apple in Talks with US Banks to Develop Mobile Person-To-Person Payment Service

#180

Post by gkop »

untog wrote: post #103
mortenjorck wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how it starts. Which, presumably is the same vector for Square Cash.

It is? Given that Square already does merchant payments it would be a pretty odd direction.

Square Cash for Business followed regular (consumer) Square Cash. Square Cash for Business lets Square save money by charging debit cards instead of credit cards and spinning it as more convenient for everybody (it is very convenient once set up).
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