Why Apple Wants to Get into the Unprofitable World of Payments Between Friends
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
My personal wishlist item is being able to pay at a restaurant with my phone, without ever asking the waiter for the tab.
Right now this requires multiple legs:
1. Ask waiter for check (first trip)
2. they go print it out and come back with it (second trip)
3. I hand over my CC, and they take it to the register (third trip)
4. They return with my credit card, and now I can finally leave the restaurant.
A beefed up Apple Pay would be so cool for this scenario.
This is more secure against skimming too, and allows Chip & Pin to be easily used.
33% food cost
33% labor cost
30% overhead
07% profit
_______________
103%
Er... wat?
The friend in question is 21.
The first time I ever even heard of Venmo was when my roommates were collecting the rent checks but were out of town - they are in their early 20s and, well, I'm not that young :)
I feel either this distinction isn't important to many or that Square Cash is just widely unknown.
As important as efficiency is, running your personal life on 100% efficiency is going to end up with people being bored as hell. Let's take out one click, remove any effort for a human being. Would we all be happy if we literally sat in the same corner and never did anything? That's 100% efficiency, you don't even have to order your groceries because they are automatically shipped to you!
There is a balance that is heavily, heavily overlooked in automation. Not to mention, removing 2 steps from paying at a restaurant is just...completely unimportant. What a waste of everyone's time, money, and talents.
If you were really concerned about not wasting people's time or talents, saving a busy professional 3 round trips would be helpful.
Or more realistically, it would result in fewer staff members for that restaurant.
I want to know that I can get up and leave whenever I want to. This makes me feel much more comfortable and relaxed.
"also has the benefit of giving time to patrons to relax and chat while they finish up a meal."I believe the latter part of what you said is why, contrary to the former part of your statement, their offering will never be irrelevant: They control a very large and, compared to the rest of the world, affluent part of the phone hardware and software market. The phone is the gateway...at least until simply using a thumbprint or iris scan on the vendor's own hardware becomes a thing. But that seems more creepy than using your own phone as a proxy/escrow service.
p2p will presumingly work almost exactly like venmo, or more accurately, iMessage. Not only are they not bringing anything new to the table, they are also not leveraging anything from them controlling the hw+sw, other than being preinstalled.
A vendor play is much more interesting, since this is where they can really shine (completing a transaction without ever unlocking your phone or typing anything).
Margin on a single transaction? >x%
Building out the already STUPENDOUS iTunes database of payment credentials?
Priceless.
Yes, low margin while you attack the beachhead. Once you secure that, and apply the 'We're Apple' reality distortion in order to wrangle standards that you control... Money magic happens.
There's an unserved market, but it's low end. Many people going to teller windows in banks are depositing cash to someone else's account to pay rent. This can be done even if the payer doesn't have an account at that branch. A deposit of cash is an immediate credit and can't bounce, so landlords like this. The depositor gets a receipt, so they can prove they paid. There's no fee for a cash deposit, so it's free to both parties.
For people with money in the bank, there are many easy ways to pay rent, but for people with little cash, this is the way to go. ATMs won't do such transactions, require an account, and will suck up your cash if you're overdrawn.
It won't be because it gets marketing from the mainstream press. Perhaps it could help bring people into the ecosystem after a certain critical mass of users is reached, and using bitcoin regularly and getting real value out of it, but almost certainly it won't help before.
The appeal has to be intrinsic first and foremost, and the critical mass has to be built to and reached first before we start criticising mainstream media outlets for not mentioning it at every given opportunity. Why would they, when it's not yet (if it will ever be) something that's particularly relevant to most of their readership?
The internet was just the same in its very early days. Misunderstood and underestimated at best, actively mocked and trivialised at worst, by the mainstream media. But, clearly, it 'won' in an unimaginably massive sense of the word. Whether this pattern will repeat with bitcoin or not, is a matter of whether bitcoin can realise its lauded potential on paper in the real markets, but regardless I think we should expect there to be a similar pattern if it can. It won't be the opposite, marketed from the top down by the mainstream press and companies, I am pretty confident. But let's see how the next 5 years plays out.. it's going to be fascinating to find out what happens!
Venmo, for example, is extremely useful.