Seems to be the latest push by Apple to integrate Apple Pay into some sort of payments ecosystem by force.
Should be interesting to see if there is any compelling reason to use Apple's solution over Venmo which has a huge incumbency advantage at this point.
I'm not sure why you'd consider this to be 'by force' – surely having a large market share, and offering a decent experience, are enough reasons for an ecosystem to develop because users want it?
Having a large market share of what, the smartphone market? It's the users of the peer-to-peer payment service/application that they need, and they have 0 of those right now.
Venmo already has millions of those users (many of whom who use iPhones) due to a good UX/UI and seamless integration with all major banks/card providers. So what value does apple bring to the table if my network is already set up on Venmo?
I think having a large smartphone platform to which you can roll out new features is really useful! There are what – maybe 4-5 million active Apple Pay users? That's a decent chunk of in-built market for the service, assuming it's seamlessly available to them all.
Obviously P2P Apple Pay doesn't offer you much benefit if you've already got a working solution to the problem.
I've never heard of Venmo, nor have any of my tech friends.
The key to the product is the strength of the network. They got all the major banks and CC providers to sign onto the platform, which was unprecedented. So from that standpoint, it's a fantastic product.
It's not particularly well designed, I don't know why there's a social dimension to it, etc. I don't think every product needs to be impressive and I don't mean it as a dig on Venmo. Just that if there IS a way to fill this niche in an "impressive" way, Venmo isn't it.
Edit: Actually Square Cash is pretty damn impressive. Emailing cash instantly with no need for accounts? That's baller.
insert chuckle here
Perhaps because Apple has incredible resources compared to Venmo, no one over 30 uses Venmo, and because Apple can easily integrate with the ACH system to enable these transfers.
If Apple were so inclined, they go so far as to have a banking subsidiary that was a stakeholder in the ACH system, thereby allowing them to shape the protocol currently being worked on to allow real time ACH transfers.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/21/facebook-poke-vs-snapchat-w...
https://gigaom.com/2014/09/04/facebooks-slingshot-experiment...
Venmo vs. Apple. I'll take my chances with Apple.
Yes I realize Venmo is controlled by Paypal.