Apple showed a new person-to-person payment feature in Apple Pay in today’s WWDC 2017. The slide showed that this feature will be built in iMessages. It will be available in this fall. We don’t know much information for now, but the person-to-person payment feature can possibly be huge for churners: Is it free to make a debit card transfer? Does it support credit card transfers? Will the limit be huge? Can we use it to meet the credit card spending requirements?
Below are my guesses.
This article mentioned that, “Money-transfer services backed by a debit card will be free for users, while those backed by a credit card will be hit with a 3 percent fee — the same as competitors.” Although I don’t know where they got this information, I think it’s quite reasonable: Venmo has the same fee structure.
But we don’t recommend to use Venmo to meet spending requirements. Why? Because Venmo hate such behaviors, even though they earn money from the fees. If you keep using credit cards to make transfers, while don’t have much legit transactions, your Venmo account will be closed very soon.
But if Apple has the same feature, that can be a totally different story! Apple may be far more insensitive than Venmo. I remember in the old gold days, churners played with prepaid debit cards. There were many similar products, and most of them were sensitive. But Redbird, BlueBird, Serve, which are the products by the rich AmEx, are robust. We had a lot of fun back then. Now Apple is far more rich than AmEx, there’s reason to believe it’s insensitive. Who knows whether Apple will acquiesce this kind of behavior? If so, we won’t need to worry about spending requirements any more!
But this article also mentioned, Apple is partnering with prepaid payment card company Green Dot for this new feature. Green Dot is famous for shutting down people’s account. But who knows whether they will change the behavior for Apple? Anyway, let’s wait and see, and hope for the best!
HT: reddit.