Apple set to take on Afterpay with its own buy now, pay later product
rom Affirm and PayPal.

July 14, 2021 — 9.13am

By Mark Gurman and Sridhar Natarajan

Apple is working on a new service that will let consumers pay for any Apple Pay purchase in instalments over time, rivalling the “buy now, pay later” offerings popularised by services from Affirm and PayPal.

The upcoming service, known internally as Apple Pay Later, will use Goldman Sachs as the lender for the loans needed for the instalment offerings, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Goldman Sachs has been Apple’s partner for the Apple Card credit card since 2019, but the new offering isn’t tied to the Apple Card and doesn’t require the use of one, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing unannounced products.

The upcoming service, known internally as Apple Pay Later, will use Goldman Sachs as the lender for the loans needed for the installment offerings, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The upcoming service, known internally as Apple Pay Later, will use Goldman Sachs as the lender for the loans needed for the installment offerings, according to people with knowledge of the matter.AP

The buy now, pay later system could help drive Apple Pay adoption and convince more users to use their iPhone to pay for items instead of standard credit cards. Apple receives a percentage of transactions made with Apple Pay, driving additional revenue to the company’s more than $US50 billion ($67.2 billion) per year services business.

The service is currently planned to work as follows: When a user makes a purchase via Apple Pay on their Apple device, they will have the option to pay for it either across four interest-free payments made every two weeks, or across several months with interest, one of the people said. The plan with four payments is called “Apple Pay in 4” internally, while the longer-term payment plans are dubbed “Apple Pay Monthly Instalments.”

When making purchases through an Apple Pay Later plan, users will be able to choose any credit card to make their payments over time. The service is planned to be available for purchases made at either retail or online stores. Apple already offers monthly instalments via the Apple Card for purchases of its own products, but this service would expand that technology to any Apple Pay transaction.

The interest rates that Apple plans to charge for the monthly instalments couldn’t be learned. Affirm charges as much as 30 per cent APR, while other rivals charge less. The interest-free four instalment plans would rival similar systems like ones from Afterpay Klarna Bank and Sezzle in addition to PayPal’s popular Pay in 4 service.

Affirm fell as much as 13 per cent on the news, while PayPal declined about 1.4 per cent.

Users who want to use the Apple Pay Later service will need to be approved via an application submitted through the iPhone’s Wallet app, where they will also be able to manage their payments. Users will need to submit a copy of their local ID card to apply for the program. Apple will also offer customers the ability to exit payment plans to pay off the remainder of their purchase balance.

At least some of the Apple Pay Later plans will also exclude late fees and processing fees, only costing users interest for longer-term plans. The service will also not require running a credit check on the user. Separately, the company is also testing a feature that will let users create temporary, digital Apple Pay Later credit cards for individual purchases.

Apple’s new service is still in development and its features could change or be cancelled, the people said. Spokespeople for Apple and Goldman Sachs declined to comment.

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Morgan Stanley last week predicted Afterpay Money could be used to refer customers for mortgages, and to offer cryptocurrency or share trading.

On an earnings call earlier on Tuesday, Goldman chief financial officer Stephen Scherr said he believes there are “more opportunities to be had with Apple.” Goldman’s alliance with consumer darlings like Apple is aimed at helping it find a footing in the world of consumer banking – an expansion it has sought in recent years to spread its reach beyond the world of high finance on Wall Street.

Apple’s iPhone-based payment service is accepted at 85 per cent of all US retailers, according to the company. The new service would mark one of the largest additions to the service since its launch in 2014, following other features like peer-to-peer payments. Apple last year acquired a company that developed technology to allow phones to receive payments by tapping another phone or credit card on its back, adding another potential feature to the Apple payments road map.

Bloomberg

Media Calories. Nutritious or empty?

In challenging times we seek certainty or the illusion of same through information or data seeking.

Care is needed when consuming the junk food that media has become. The access to snack food (m and m commercial anyone?) packaged into convenient snippets, avoids the need to think at first glance.

On the road to finding certainty through consuming empty-media-calories, one can end the day feeling unsatiated.

#BeAwareOfTheAlgorithms

“Facebook should do everything in its power to prevent its tools and algorithms from driving people toward self-reinforcing echo chambers of extremism (which can) have dangerous (and life-threatening) real-world consequences.”

ref: Facebook civil-rights record hammered in own review

“Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” read a slide from a 2018 presentation. “If left unchecked,” it warned, Facebook would feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.”

“The high number of extremist groups was concerning, the presentation says. Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-division-top-executives-nixed-solutions-11590507499

What an interesting time we live in.

Why do retailers make people line up?

Why do we make people lineup to spend THEIR money? Checkout isle add-on sales aside, this has never made sense to me.
Walmart is trialling an iphone app that enables consumers to scan their purchases and therefore cut down in queue processing time.
Reference: http://mobile.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSBRE87U11R20120831?irpc=932
There is one more logical step to be taken but that will be the topic for a different post.

Walk the isles of an online store.

An Australian company has developed a product that enables e-Commerce store visitors to visualise the products on range and to walk through the virtual store.
Internet Retailing describe the product in more detail http://www.internetretailing.com.au/virtual-shopping.html and there is a short video to get a feel for the promised experience.