Apple’s ambitions for mobile payments apparently go way beyond just Apple Pay. The Wall Street Journal, via CNBC, is reporting that Apple is in negotiations with major banks to develop a person-to-person payment system that would take on PayPal. Talks are still in early stages but the report claims the new service could launch as soon as 2016. As CNBC notes, PayPal’s share prices immediately dropped by 2% on news of the report.
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WSJ’s sources say the service being considered “would allow consumers to zap payments from their checking accounts to recipients through their Apple devices” and “would likely be linked to the company’s Apple Pay system, which allows customers to make credit-card and debit-card payments with their mobile phones.” Among the banks Apple has been talking with are J.P. Morgan Chase, Capital One, Wells Fargo and U.S. Bancorp.
Although person-to-person payment systems are nothing new, Apple has shown an impressive ability to get its users to adopt new technologies it offers on its devices. Apple Music has millions of estimated monthly subscribers despite coming out long after Spotify conquered the streaming world, for instance. And similarly, Apple Pay quickly became the most widely used mobile payments system around when it launched last year even though Google Wallet had been in existence years before.
