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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>I'm sceptical about this. The reason is that all banks in the US are subject to rather stringent know-your-customer regulation. They have to obtain documentation on their clients, which by law can be shared with the authorities. As far as I know, this makes it rather simple to trace the flow of money, at least domestically. If Apple were to become a bank, I don't see how they would get around those regulations.

They wont.

But that's about Apple Pay transactions, which are logged into their central servers anyway, and will be given to the government when asked, as all banks do.

This is not about data on Apple Pay transactions, but about Apple Pay's security itself.

You wouldn't use an easily compromisable phone as your be-all-end-all wallet, the same way you wouldn't use an insecure banking portal.

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Apple Pay transactions are not logged on Apple's "central servers". Apple has absolutely zero insight into what you buy with Apple Pay. The tokenization protocol is run by the card networks, not Apple.

* for now

Well, that's orthogonal to the argument.

Wherever they are logged, they will be available to the government -- Apple doesn't care about those data, but about the security of Apple Pay.

Banking systems don't need impenetrable security for people to use them. People pay online and use online banking every day from easily compromisable laptops. They do so because banks and credit card companies have good fraud coverage (unless you're negligent).

I think the real reason for Apples worry is that they want people to trust the smartphones for way more then just payments, for instance Health information. And people might just end up much more reluctant to do so if they know the phones are easily hackable.

> Banking systems don't need impenetrable security for people to use them. People pay online and use online banking every day from easily compromisable laptops. They do so because banks and credit card companies have good fraud coverage (unless you're negligent).

Author's claim was that they defend security of their platform to outcompete other payment processors on fraud insurance costs.

If the article's point is just that Apple wants to maintain customer trust in the security of the iPhone, well, Tim Cook has stated exactly that numerous times. I don't understand why it took a whole post full of ill-considered speculation about banking to echo that sentiment.

>If the article's point is just that Apple wants to maintain customer trust in the security of the iPhone, well, Tim Cook has stated exactly that numerous times. I don't understand why it took a whole post full of ill-considered speculation about banking to echo that sentiment.

Obviously because the whole point of the article is not to merely echo the sentiment, but to attempt a guess at the reasons behind it.

Do we really need a secret Apple bank plan for this to make sense? Heck, millions of people already bank on their iPhone, using apps.

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