According to a recent report from Wall Street Journal, Apple is working with different banks to introduce a peer-to-peer payment service to take on the likes of PayPal and Venmo, and now another report suggests that Apple could use iMessage to make such money transfer a breeze.
Apple is already in talks with the likes of JPMorgan Chase, US Bancorp, Wells Fargo, and Citi, and they are currently working on some technical difficulties involved in achieving making peer-to-peer payment service happen, report Wall Street Journal. It is also being said that Apple will offer the service without charging any fees and will bear the loss.
Now in a new report, Quartz citing their sources “who have discussed the program with Apple,” reports that the reported person-to-person payment system could use iMessage – Apple’s popular instant messaging service for iOS users – to facilitate the payments between iOS users. Other payment services are already tied or trying to integrate with messaging services such as Facebook Messenger in the US and AliPay and WeChat in Asia.
The report suggests that Apple is partnering with Banks for its peer-to-peer service in order to sidestep the licensing and the regulatory scrutiny that other payment service such as PayPal, Venmo, AirBnb, and other have to face.
The report suggests that there are two main reasons of Apple entering the P2P space; the first one is the feature is very popular with the coveted millennial demographic, and second, this will attract more users towards Apple’s mobile payment service called Apple Pay. Apple launched its Apple Pay service back in October 2014, but it could not grow at a rapid pace due to lack of support from retailers’ system for the service.
Apple has reportedly been working on this P2P payment service for at least a year. There’s is no indication of when Apple will launch this new payment service, and given that it’s still in its early development stages, do not expect a launch anytime soon.