Is this only for merchants? I feel like here in the US we still don't have a great way to send money back and forth with friends and family. Zelle is decent if both parties' banks support it, but otherwise I've tried Google Pay, Paypal, Venmo, and they all have some problem or another. A lot of them (I'm looking at you PayPal) require you to give them your bank username and password!
There’s many debit card “send to friend” apps that fill this space, including Apple Cash and Square Cash and etc. but your most likely compatibility app is Venmo. I’ve had zero issues with any of the Cash apps I’ve used to date, though.
You can send money using Apple Pay, but most of these free money transfer applications are free because they’re using ACH, so they “need” access to the bank account to see if the underlying funds are there.
If they transact like a credit card processor, there are fees.
This is setup so that you can run an existing merchant app (launching with Stripe) and collect money with all of the same fee requirements as using stripe normally.
I could have sworn there was something about being able to hold 2 iPhones together to initiate sharing something with Apple Pay to a friend.
That being said, I use Apple Pay all the time to send money between my partner and me. It is tied to iMessage but since we are always texting anyways it is super convenient. But the convenience may largely be due to already having my payment information as part of Apple Pay to begin with. But it just uses my debit card to send money, it doesn't need access to my bank account.
Regarding your allegation about Paypal, are you outside of the US? I ask simply because I am in the US and have never had to provide a username or password to my bank account to Paypal. I do have a bank account linked but it was done simply by Paypal making two small deposits to my account and then withdrawing them and asking me to tell them the amounts of the transactions. Given, this was many years ago, but I would be surprised to learn that this has changed.
I don't like Zelle because I like using a credit card and accumulating credit card points.
so its a non-starter for me.
although one time I did a chargeback on a Venmo transaction, and Venmo banned me. that was an inconvenient few months before I maybe tricked their system. maybe as in I'm not sure they are just tolerating me.
But Zelle, Venmo, and similar are cash apps...? Why would you want to pay a 3% credit card fee per transaction just so you could accumulate a couple credit card points?
A couple reasons when eating that credit card fee is worth it for me:
1) Although it is accurate that paying the merchant fees yourself as a consumer makes it a loss on the credit card points, the points themselves can have a much higher exchange rate with transfer partners, which makes it not a loss. For example, with the credit card company their points are range from a value of half a cent to 2 cents each, a hotel or airline may have a fixed exchange rate based on a different metric such as quality or distance, that is completely decoupled from the current dollar value of the good and service. (ie. a fancy hotel might cost $300 one night and $1,700 another night, but only costs 25,000 points all nights. better to just have a balance of points)
2) Many of my purchases are expenses I deduct against my taxable earnings, and that makes me less price sensitive and more spend sensitive. The points I can use solely for my consumptive activities, which makes play time free.
If I had to guess this will reuse their Apple Pay Merchant IDs, or at least I'm really hoping that's the case. If so any iOS dev that sets that up could use this (and has a payment processor to work with).
