Apple Cash(apple.com) |
Apple Cash(apple.com) |
Just want to post it since Apple kinda buried it deep down.
Otherwise it'll remain a tiny proportion of the overall payments industry.
https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/beggars-with-qr-co...
But with SEPA Instant Payments (https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/integration/retail/instant_pa...) there is:
- A scheme that works based on standards: ISO PACS messages (easy for other banks to join)
- Actually transfer the funds from bank A to bank B (not sure if other schemes mentioned here basically work on a "we received an acknowledgement, we promise to send the actual money later via a real payment") in a 10 second period
- Does not depend on the commitment of a (small) group of private companies top keep existing, but instead depends on an obligation in EU law enforcing the national banks to force their member banks to implement it
The only thing that still sucks is that you send money to others based on their IBAN - which is fine but definitely not as intuitive as an e-mail address or phone number.
"Apple Cash services are provided by Green Dot Bank, Member FDIC. Learn more about the Terms and Conditions. Only available in the U.S. on eligible devices. To send and receive money with an Apple Cash account, you must be 18 and a U.S. resident. If you’re under 18, your family organizer can set up Apple Cash for you as part of their Apple Cash Family account. Security checks may require more time to make funds available. Apple Cash Family accounts can send or receive up to $2000 per transaction or within a seven-day period. Sending money from Wallet requires iOS 15.5 or later.
An Apple Cash card is required to use Daily Cash, except if you do not have an Apple Cash card, in which case you can only apply your Daily Cash as a credit on your statement balance. The Apple Cash card is issued by Green Dot Bank, Member FDIC. See apple.com/apple-pay for more information. Daily Cash is earned on purchases after the transaction posts to your account. Actual posting times vary by merchant. Daily Cash is subject to exclusions, and additional details apply. See the Apple Card Customer Agreement for more information.
Variable APRs range from 11.24% to 22.24% based on creditworthiness. Rates as of April 1, 2022.
To access and use all the features of Apple Card, you must add Apple Card to Wallet on an iPhone or iPad with the latest version of iOS or iPadOS. Update to the latest version by going to Settings > General > Software Update. Tap Download and Install.
Available for qualifying applicants in the United States.
Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch"https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT207886
it says among other requirements for Apple Cash:
What you need
- Be at least 18 years old and live in the United States.
I only did a cursory glance at it but is there an Android app planned for this? In my experience, people want to send money to one another across different mobile OSes.
Anyway, I ended up just writing a Matrix bot* that's a glorified spreadsheet. It's 600 lines of Rust, or probably 100 of Python. Works a treat!
* https://github.com/pkulak/bots/blob/main/src/bots/money.rs
Few products have made our personal lives so much easier. Not having to ever get/give cash for them is amazing.
From the FAQ: >How do I add money to my Apple Cash card? >If you’re under 18, money is added to your Apple Cash card only when someone sends you money.
Apple has had Cash for a long time (the Apple Card uses it for card rewards).
I am worried about them now. They will find this super convenient and will use it from day one. Hope this service is private.
If so, then this page may answer your question. Basically unless you’re transferring over $22k in total in a year using Apple Cash, you’re fine.
https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
Multiply such occurrences several times a month and you get the idea.
Thanks for the link, it's helpful.
Not a lawyer but I remember reading that the IRS (or equivalent) would be watching for patterns (large amounts/frequent transfers in just below a threshold etc across different sources -- bank accounts etc) . If there is probable cause, they might have to get a subpoena. This app is just one more source for them to confirm/deny wrongdoing.
Can I get the money out of Apple Cash, except for spending it via Apple Pay? Can I withdraw the money to a bank account? If not, I find it a bit limiting. If someone sends me money via Paypal, I can transfer it to my bank account and withdraw it from an ATM, or use it to buy stocks, or donate it to some organization that doesn't take Apple Pay payments...
Never heard of Green Dot Bank. They seem to have these banks listed under them:
"GO2bank, GoBank and Bonneville Bank".
I assume that Green Dot Bank isn't holding the money itself but passing it on to a bigger bank. Anyone know who's actually behind this ?
Edit: I think maybe Green Dot is holding the money themselves on this are they a well known bank in the USA ?
Green Dot is or was the dominant prepaid card sold in Walmart and all major grocery stores. They offer a Rapid Reload service where you can bring cash to a Walmart register and have it loaded into a prepaid card.
They basically serve people who have been ejected from the banking system. One of their main products was an anonymous card that could be reloaded and used to transfer money. A favorite of prostitutes and other illegal services that was eventually snuffed out by the banks because of KYC (know your customer) violations.
People would load money onto the card and just give it to someone else or transfer between them. All anon.
Most banks wouldn't work in this manner due to high risk.
Edit - Looks like they do pre-paid credit cards, which explain why I’ve never heard of them. Been around since 1999.
Consumers also enjoy CFPB protection/regulation with this product.
Apple calls Green Dot APIs for servicing and the backing account(s) is at Green Dot Bank.
To be fair, it would be borderline pointless here. Bank transfers are instant and free in almost all cases, and competition from the challenger banks has made the process a lot smoother in the legacy banks’ apps too.
I think the only USP Apple’s offering would have here is nice iMessage integration.
Smart. Its a clever way to deal with legal boundaries on transferring money. Should be interesting to see them get it past Australian regulations.
[0] https://dfpi.ca.gov/money-transmitter-division/directory-of-...
is this VISA CardPay ?
The cards are issued by Green Dot Bank
I was shocked as a young adult when I could travel in the US and use my debit card to get money at almost any atm, yet Americans had to sometimes seek out the correct ATM, even in their country.
I was shocked again in Japan when I moved here ten years ago when online banking was useless, transfers took up to 3 days, and most of the bank’s atms closed at 5 or 6pm. Oddly enough I could always find some atm open 24 hours that worked with my Canadian debit card, even when I could not find an atm open that worked with my Japan Post bank debit card. Those problems are all solved now, but it’s no wonder that there are now 30+ competing digital payment systems in Japan vs just a few in Canada. You also have to still really go out of your way when choosing a bank to make sure that your debit card will work overseas.
The original Canadian system is called Interac, and it’s nice that everyone has been able to use it for 30+ Years. I’ve never heard of anyone being blacklisted due to an error, like you hear about with PayPal and the other things that have come since then.
When it works perfectly, the transaction is still nowhere near instant (transfers “cross” only at certain times of the day, almost as if it involves actual people driving between banks - ludicrous!) and recipient banks often do not recognize receipt for a day. And the fees are relatively absurd ($80-120 to send and to the same to receive) considering Interac money transfers are free.
I’ll note that literally everyone I deal with shares the same experiences with wires.
It is bizarre that the largest, likely most important, transactions we have a system that works objectively far worse with fewer checks and balances and more opportunity for error than the system we use for meaningless small transactions.
ATMs are also mind-boggling after getting used to banks that will refund ATM fees in the US. In Canada it's back to the fee to use ATM + fee from the bank for using an ATM that I remember from 20 years ago in the US.
Little cumbersome since I never bothered to get peoples phone numbers till recently.
It seems that, by now, except Czech Republic & Slovakia [1], the EPC QR code [2] has won.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Payment_Descriptor [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPC_QR_code
Payment links are easier and quicker to use than manually entering details in your banking app.
Nobody in technology, at least in the USA, seems to be able to make the marketing for their "payment things" understandable. On the Google side, there is (or was) Google Wallet (OG), Android Pay, Google Pay, gPay, now Google Wallet (new). I don't know which one I should be using, or what each one deliberately can't do. Some handset makers have their own apps: Samsung Pay, for example. Then, there's the individual apps: Venmo, PayPal, Square Cash, Zelle, Xoom...
A web search shows there are probably a dozen more, all incompatible with each other. It's like VHS vs Betamax and HD-DVD vs. BluRay all over again, but instead with 20 different formats. How has this industry so royally fucked up something that should be pretty straightforward?
I guess it's luck that some countries happened to get the banks to agree to something like this at the particular time when the technology needed to support it just had matured (in Sweden a government supported e-ID had just become prevalent), and then it's kind of difficult for them to pull out and say "now everybody should pay for it".
Here you can pay with Swish in most stores as well, but the prevalent payment method there is still mastercard/visa I think.
Because... money? Venmo built up the biggest user base and was subsequently bought out by PayPal for big bucks. Zelle was a major initiative by the banks themselves, but too late, I suppose, to sway the habits of the consumers themselves. There was also SquareCash, but they were also too late into the game, particularly because they had no institutional support behind them like Zelle. Lastly, Apple Cash, while particularly convenient, IMHO just did not advertise it well enough. Also, being limited to Apple devices only, kinda misses the point of making payments easy, since you can't be expected to always remember/check which device does your payee have.
Most other service you mentioned were just regular payment processing intermediaries, not p2p solutions like Venmo/Squarecash/Apple Cash.
It's a mess indeed, but at the end of the day, from my experience, Venmo in the US still is the go-to method, seconded only by Zelle.
If you ever have to ask this in America, the answer is almost always corporations and lobbying.
> How has this industry so royally fucked up something that should be pretty straightforward?
There has been a constant trend throughout history minimize plebian agency and power. For a few decades after WWII the common citizen gained agency and now corporations and governments alike are clawing it back.
Anything that can be represented in a barcode or QR code can be stored in it. Which of course turns out to be a lot of things, payments are just one part of it.
Edit: added link, but it's preinstalled on most modern Android devices.
Don't forget Fitbit Pay! (As Google apparently did)
- Apple Pay is a method to pay using the payment cards in your Wallet in stores and online that is supported by many credit/debit cards
- Apple Card is a MasterCard credit card
- Apple Cash is an bank account with a VISA debit card. This is inline with other similar services like the popular "Cash app"
Compared to other confusing naming schemes (Apple TV/+, and absolutely anything Google does) this seems pretty straightforward to me.
(Also a neat part of a virtual card: checking in the Apple Wallet I can see that the card already switched numbers/networks for me. I don't need to wait for a replacement card. If not for this comment I wouldn't have even thought to check if it had switched, just transparent in the background. I probably got an email on it I ignored if I had wanted to know sooner, but there are so many emails.)
So Apple Pay is the service, Apple Card is their credit card and Apple Cash is their debit card via some bank. You can sidestep all that and just put your own credit card in the Wallet and use some other cash-like service.
The large problem with a lot of these cash-like services is in order for the exchange to happen, two people have to be on the same service. If Apple Cash takes off, then you just need to know if your friend has an iPhone and then its viable and much easier than having to go signup for one of these other services (zelle, cash app, venmo, etc.) just to chip in for a gift or dinner.
You can. In fact, if you're using Apple Card, the cash-back rewards show up as Apple Cash.
(Some confusion here is that you can have a separate Apple Store/iTunes credit that isn't Apple Cash and doesn't show up as a card in the Apple Wallet and can only be spent in the Apple Store/iTunes. Given the nature of how gift cards work that's likely to remain a separate "cash fund" and the two separate balances may always be a little confusing, with some people likely putting money into one when they meant to put it into the other. Hopefully Apple may find a good way to communicate the differences between them.)
It's also a virtual debit card, so you can spend or transfer the money, but it seems the its raison d'être is p2p payments.
Pay is the whole system of APIs used to pay via NFC or online, authed by biometrics (Touch/FaceID). As a user you just add your credit card and it works better than contactless credit cards.
Apple Card is an Apple credit card with cashback backed by Goldman Sachs. US-only.
I can't imagine how Apple concluded that "It's exactly like Venmo in every way, but it only works for people with iPhones!" would make a particularly compelling value proposition.
The sad part is that these apps are needed at all. In Australia the government just regulated that all banks must support free and instant money transfers and that email addresses and phone numbers be supported as addresses to send to.
So if your friend wants to send you money, you type their email on any bank app and it pops up with their legal name confirming you have the right person. The money shows up instantly.
Privacy is an area where Apple tries to differentiate. It’s not great that this is Apple only, but it’s also nice that it just works.
Like mobile money in Africa, various service providers will jump up to allow cross wallet transfers.
I would use Zelle for cross device transfer or any of the other apps, it's not like we have a shortage of them. Although I agree it would be good if we had less of them to need to use.
Is this sentence what you actually meant to say? It makes sense if the last noun is "Android".
A terminal should work with any product that functions as a debit card, pre-pay or not. As it happens, my children do have actual current accounts behind the cards they use. But it seems like UK banking is becoming less willing to issue full-spec debit cards to younger teens :(.
1. You can discover the counterparty using their registered mobile phone number tied with their bank account. In B2B and P2P scenarios, the business or the individual already has the counterparty's phone number in most cases. So, this handles like 90% of the cases of simple discoverability. For use cases like sending money to friends/family, this is perfect.
2. The mapping of the virtual address to the bank account is maintained and managed by the banks (as part of the bank's UPI interface mandated by the standard) and shared with the NPCI's UPI backend using tokenization.
3. A user can create multiple virtual private addresses [VPAs] (eg: mybillpay@bigbank, subscriptions@bigbank etc.,). The user can then track their spends/receipts by VPA.
The ease of use is an order of magnitude higher compared to entering bank account information. Settlements are bank-to-bank and instantaneous (~2-3 secs) powered by the NPCI backbone.
India used to have a high use of Cash-on-delivery (COD) for e-commerce. This gave a good electronic equivalent for COD that also helped e-com operators.
I see how that makes sense for most people, but I have so many emails and phone numbers and change them so frequently that I find it somewhat spooky. Providers can re-assign a phone number after some time, and when I transfer money using a phone number the app does not show me the name of the recipient before making the transfer (understandably, as that would be a terrible privacy leak), so I don't feel comfortable doing it...
At the same time, I am pretty sure that banks are loth to re-assign an account number, and if they do so, have processes in place that are adequate to the significance of that (as opposed to telco providers, who presumably did not intend for their phone numbers to serve as an identifier for money transfers...)
Which makes it all a major cluster f. Same thing happened to messaging.
Apple TV - app on various platforms (that offers the subscription service, and sometimes acts as a container for other services plus replaces the old iTunes Movie Store which also sold TV shows)
Apple TV+ - subscription service
tvOS - operating system (but most consumers will never have heard of this)
(Remember Apple once tried to trademark App)
I would really like to know what activity you are doing that is causing you so many payment processing issues.
Unless you are talking about LVTS which AFAIK is only used for inter-bank transfers? I have no experience with that system.
They are not. Apple Cash does not require the user to have an Apple Card.
Google Pay supports iOS which is why it used over Apple Pay in countries where iPhones aren't the dominate mobile OS.
Mine is 5 characters longer than the legacy number was (added "FI", 2 check digits, 2 padding zeroes, removed dash), for a total of 18 characters.
Also, I don’t necessarily want to login to my bank app to send money to someone to cover dinner. But a secondary app, like Venmo, is fine.
My old house cleaner used Zelle, new one Venmo. I recently prepaid for a camping trip and needed 40 parents from kids’ school to pay me back. Most used Venmo, a few used Zelle, one sent to my wife’s PayPal. Most of my friends use Zelle (and close friends and family use Apple Cash because it has the least amount of friction, once set up).
My kid in preschool has an extra sports class and music class. Both are paid by Zelle. Last month I got a haircut and the owner had a sign saying she preferred Zelle (saves 2-3% vs Cc/Square). Zelle seems to be growing amongst small businesses.
I once sent a friend who works at Square some square cash. It went unredeemed because he forgot about it. Had to resend.
I’ve only used wires when buying homes.
I use ACH to pay taxes, some utilities, etc.
StateFarm lets me pay my insurance bill with ApplePay, which gives me 2% cash back.
In short, very Balkanized with no dominant system.
Yes the US does have Zelle technically, but it's not really a solution at least in the foreseeable future.
Going down this list, I don't think I've ever used a bank that didn't have it: https://www.zellepay.com/get-started
If you wanted a no-security-promises send-money-to-your-friends system, you probably already had PayPal or CashApp or something else of the sort. As far as I can tell, it's a popular fit for people who were scraping PayPal's "seriously, your selling-stuff-on-Facebook thing is a business, pay business fees" detection a little too closely.
The timing also seemed odd, with the promises of FedNow being "real soon now" -- do they intend to eventually run Zelle atop it, or is it an attempt to build an installed base (and vendor lock in) before every bank in the country can say "Well, we're all on the same network, so transfers are immediate for everyone?"
My experience with managing boarding passes in Android is absolutely abysmal because Android does not support pkpass (the format Apple uses).
If an airliner is only making boarding passes available in pkpass, then ask your airliner to support more than just Apple devices. The one I flew with at the weekend "just worked".
I didn't know about this stuff before your comment as I've not yet encountered a pkpass formatted digital file. But I do see that there are conversion apps available if I did give across them. I'm just not surprised Google wouldn't adopt a non standard format.
That's overly paranoid, and the defensiveness leads to self-defeat.
There's no incentive for Apple to change the spec confrontationally like that, especially if more people use it. People will stop buying or using their products.
From my perspective, no-one's using this ticketing spec any more because of this fear. You have to download apps for all the services you want and view your tickets/passes/cards in those apps. Very view companies export just the card/ticket without an app (when some of them started out doing this), and increasingly they just keep the ticket in their app. The only thing that seems to consistently work for more than a couple of years are my bank cards - presumably because I can pay with contactless.
Those services which have given up using Wallet are now harder to use and less appealing. They create friction and dissatisfaction with every transaction. And now I don't trust Apple Wallet any more (in terms of being useful). I actually feel freer to leave the Apple ecosystem now than I ever have done because nothing works as well as promised. (The two things keeping me with Apple are not Apple benefits, but Google's failings: surveillance based business model and that their ecosystem looks worse still).
And I'd get the same reply I get when I ask for an upgrade.
I think it was announced at Google IO a week or two ago.
EDIT: Ok, maybe just in Germany.
And just to be clear: Paypal is an adverse company that tries to trick its users on every page.
Here's some data from Google: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
Still leaves Google', Apple's or Facebook's solutions in the dust.
And as such, the p2p ecosystems differentiate themselves by giving people ways to pay merchants without explicitly needing to move that money out of the network. So, Cash App issued a debit card, and then PayPal, and then Venmo (yep, even though it's a subsidiary, it's a separate card). And then some of them started using real bank accounts (with routing/account numbers) to back the stored balance. And the result today is that all these p2p apps look awfully a lot like banks, but less encumbered by regulations because they don't do everything that banks do.
Back to your question, why bother changing to Venmo (or Cash App) when PayPal is basically the same at this point? Obviously, the primary reason would be if everyone you know is using not-PayPal. A secondary reason is the same reason that people have different credit cards from different banks: different rewards schemes (yep, there are incentives for using those p2p debit cards).
Zelle is probably the odd one out here, because it's just an extra thing built on top of existing participating banks that already have all these ways of moving money out of their networks. It's effectively a wire transfer replacement without the fee (or a physical check replacement without the check-writing).
(Disclosure: am employed by a company that has a p2p product.)
They don't just look, they are banks (or has a bank they outsource the regulated activity to). This is a piece they're not too keen on disclosing, except in very tiny print, as they wouldn't like their user to realize they can go and complain to the regulator regulating their companies when they leave their customers high and dry.
Where Venmo wins with Zelle and PayPal is the privacy: you don’t have to hand out your email address or phone number — you’re payee only knows your handle.
That's how a client-server model works, definitely not p2p.
I have no clue how Venmo or Zelle work though, so I don't have an answer to your latter question.
Next time I’ll just use the bill pay and make the bank eat the cost of a stamp.
You should give Wise and/or Revolut a try. The apps are way better, and probably one of the best features both have is virtual cards (Revolut has also a one-time card that is automatically destroyed after use). Note that you also get physical cards with both. I think Revolut has a few more features that Wise lacks, like travel and device insurance, but for the financial part, the features are nearly identical. Also, currency exchange rates are way better than traditional banks.
It literally "just worked". It was intuitive too... I'd not seen it before and knew where to find everything.
I hadn't seen the functionality before (but haven't travelled in ages), and everything I would reasonably hope for from it was there working flawlessly. Even this morning when I looked at it I see it's moved into the "Expired passes" section as I would expect from a flight in the past.
Similar for the COVID pass in Google Pay... it was accepted at KubeCon, it was accepted at the Canadian border, it was accepted at the Spain border. Everything "just worked".
Google Wallet is likely fully implemented in the Google Pay app today, and the change is going to be a rebranding just to let people know you can do more than just pay for things. I don't work for Google or hold shares, all of this stuff is just me using the product as a user... it all works great for me, YMMV etc.
Let's see if wallet changes this.
I think it technically takes 24-48 hours to clear, but that doesn't tend to be an issue in practice. You'll get the push notification telling you the money has arrived and your balance will update in seconds.
It's a mess.
I wish this was faster, imagine paying online by scanning a QR code with your banking app. There would be non risk of chargebacks for merchants and fees could be basically zero.
Even if I had been able to get a personnumber getting a BankID would have also been a real hassle - by law I believe Swedish banks have to grant me an account if I reside there and have a personnumber but as a US citizen they go out of their way to make it as difficult as possible due to the extremely onerous requirements that US requires foreign bank accounts comply with.
You'll run into issues trying to open an account for trading stocks though.
I’ve used it to transfer money to family, but friends sometimes use Venmo, Cash App, or others. I don’t think it ever gained critical mass.
In Singapore there’s also PayNow/PayLah
I'm a citizen and have a personnummer, but because I'm not a resident I'm not in SPAR. But I need to be neither in SPAR nor a resident for BankID or Swish.
I even managed to pick up a parcel my saying my personnummer, when they couldn't scan it off of my British driving license.