Apple Launching Peer-to-Peer Payment System, Will Bathe in Venmo's Tears
There's no launch date but PayPal stock is already dropping.
How powerful is Apple? News that the company is partnering with banks to build its own mobile-to-mobile payment system may very well change the way we pay each other back for pizza, beer, or anything else.
The announcement this week that Apple is launching a payment app was enough to cause a 1.5 percent drop in PayPal stock, even though for all anyone knows, the final result will be about as polished as Apple Maps was when it launched.
One year after launching mobile payment system Apple Pay, The Wall Street Journal reports Tim Cook and Co. are in talks with JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Capital One, and U.S. Bancorp to create a peer-to-peer payment system that would be a direct rival to Square’s Square Cash and PayPal’s Venmo app, which both dominate the market. No launch date or name for the service has been announced, but the anonymous source who leaked the information says it will let you send money from mobile-to-mobile as easy as sending a text message. Let’s hope we’ll be able to attach emoji to those payments in the memo field.
Whatever Apple comes up with will have to be a lot more attractive than past attempts to replace your wallet. The percentage of iPhone owners using Apple Pay has been on the downslope since summer, and as of October fewer than 17 percent of iPhone 6 and 6s users were purchasing with the app. A peer-to-peer system could help Apple Wallet get some traction and maybe draw people away from Venmo, but without more information all we can say for certain is that it just figures the United States would wait until paper bills were obsolete before finally agreeing to put a woman on one.
