Apple's new digital credit card, launched with Goldman Sachs, only buys the Western players a little more time in democratising payments and catching up with the Chinese players who have already surged ahead with truly innovative technologies.
April 01, 2019 | Emmanuel DanielBehind the Apple digital card is Goldman Sachs Retail. Behind that is MasterCard, and later Visa. Behind those are the other banks accepting the transaction. So it prolongs the lifespan of everyone of these players and adds more digital transactions into their income stream. So, how does any of this gets us closer to the future?
Without asking anyone, I can tell at once that the card will be only for US-based customers, and Apple has to find a bank in each of all the countries it operates in to back-end the product to offer it outside the US.
The promise for a totally borderless payment platform is one that uses a borderless token that today has to be accepted by every single regulator. The only breakthrough there will be when there is a technology player has the gall to stop asking for permission in the first place for a digital token that means the same thing to everyone. These also already exist.
The digital version of the physical credit card was too long a time coming. The concepts of transparency of information, throwing away the physical token, the device itself carrying the security features instead of dual factor authentication and so on, are all features that have existed for many years now. It's just that the traditional banks just did not see it necessary to move away from their physical card totally because their war was still at the merchant's physical point of sale.
Now that Apple has forced the idea of a fully digital version of the card, all it has done is made it easier for the banks to offer this as one of several alternatives of the basic physical card themselves, even riding on the iPhone's digital security features.
With just 13.2% of the mobile device systems in the world, Apple today can only introduce a concept that can be easily unleashed and democratised further by the giant Android platform with 86.8%. Anyone who runs a credit card business will tell you that zero fees, cash backs are not digital...
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Keywords:Payments, Technology, Mobile Payments, Qr Code, Credit Cards, Digitalisation
