As a super fan of Apple, I always keep my eyes on what’s new about apps and iPhone. Recently, I found that Apple is working on a person-to-person payments service in order to attract more people to use the Apple Wallet. Honestly, I never use my Apple Wallet before because I am concern about the safety issue of it. What if my card information is leaked? Can hackers break into my account and use my credit card?
Generally, this Peer-to-peer payment service is about to let people use their cellphones to send money to one another as easily as they send messages. Apple is now consulting with banks and this service will be ready next year. Apple is aiming for bigger slice of the payment industry and “replacing the wallet” so its biggest competitor is PayPal’s payment app—Venmo.
Apple Pay has just started from 2014 and it still has a long way to go to achieve its aims. Data shows that, as for December, there is less than 17 percent of iPhone 6 and 6s users were using Apple Pay, according to data from the research groups PYMNTS.com and InfoScout. Certainly, Apply wants to foster consumer loyalty by this peer-to-peer service. However, I don’t think it is a good move.
The competition in payment service is quite intense. This year, China’s most popular messaging app Wechat offered a payment service that its users can send payments to their friends so did Facebook Messenger. Google also experiments payments in its messaging service. Furthermore, banks are trying to create peer-to-peer payment products in their own mobile apps called clearXchange. (covers about 80 percent of all of the banks.) There is hardly any market leaves for Apple. Moreover, for now, few of these efforts earn money for the business since consumers are free to use Venmo and are charged only a small fee when using a credit card. For now, I don’t believe Apple Wallet will stand out among a bunch of competitors even with peer-to-peer payment service.