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Comment by balderdash | Hacker News Reader

I’m curious why Apple is moving to terminate as opposed to getting GS to buy them out of their contract?

My theory about the Apple Card:

Goldman Sachs is not setup to be a direct consumer bank. This caused a lot of problems:

* The ease of sign up / approval led to a lot of subprime approvals that might not have gone through with a more established lender. Not only did this cause GS to lose money on delinquent accounts, it prevented the Apple Card from ever becoming a status symbol.

* Goldman Sachs developed a reputation for almost never backing up cardholders in the case of dicey/fraudulent charges.The sense of security is a huge part of why people use a credit card for purchases. I myself terminated my Apple Card account over this.

* The card itself was just not competitive in terms of rewards. The UI/UX of the app and the deeper integration into the Apple ecosystem was nice... (if a bit confusing) but when I moved over to Chase I found myself not really missing it at all.

* Edit: Forgot one additional thing. Apple Card did not have contactless (tap) technology because they wanted to promote using Apple Pay. But whipping out your phone sucks compared to just tapping your card against a reader.

All I wanted was a simple, easy credit card. I didn't care about minmaxing bonuses etc... but when I moved over to Chase I realized I had been leaving a lot of money on the table.

All the other players but especially Chase and AMEX have very established reward systems setup.

It's possible that Apple wants to move banks specifically because they want to reposition the card and need a different partner to do it with.

I didn't know about the rep GS has gotten regarding fraud charges. My main card is a Chase one as well. Everything else is spot on. I use the Apple Card only for buying stuff from Apple (for the 3% cash back), or when I accidentally select it from my watch at the vending machine.

Rewards are much better on other cards, even if they're not as simple as cash dropped into your account on the daily.

Where do you find better rewards for general purposes? I know there are plenty of better cards for travel, and I think there’s a few that are better for dining and other misc stuff, but Apple Card (w/ Apple Pay) seems to be the best in general at 2% for any purchase?

AMEX Gold seems to be the best bang for my buck. Four points on groceries (and dining out, but we don't do that much) with a family of 4 means I rack up something north of 60k points a year just on that.

That doesn't seem like a lot, but coupled with other spending it does help with going to visit my wife's family every few years. I cashed in 90k miles per ticket to get $500 business class round trip tickets on ANA last year. That means that roughly every 4 years we can do that trip for trivial travel cost.

Wells Fargo, PayPal, SoFi, Citibank, and Fidelity[1] all offer 2% cash back on everything, unlimited, no annual fee. There's nothing special about that rate. Wells Fargo will even give you a $200 sign up bonus.

Depending on your specific spending habits you might even come out ahead with the Citi Custom Cash, which offers 5% cash back on your highest spending category (up to $500) every month, 1% cach back on everything else.

I have a credit card with Bank of America which I earn 2.625% cash back on everything, no annual fee. However, that rate requires having $100,000 invested with Merrill Lynch. - https://www.doctorofcredit.com/bank-of-america-preferred-rew...

[1]Fidelity requires you to have an investment account open with them to sign up, no minimum balance is required.

Here's an example of a policy change due to criticism about the dispute issue: https://9to5mac.com/2022/02/11/apple-card-disputes-transacti...

+1 to the whole fraud issue - I had a fraudulent transaction from the apple store, my card but not my account, and they at first refused to believe that the virtual card number could be stolen, which it can as it’s just a credit card number once it’s in a website’s database ripe for stealing. Then they tried to get me to talk to apple to refund it - saying I should give them the order number/details that kind of thing. Which I didn’t have of course! Apple was like, chargeback when I talked to them. Goldman sachs had to be prodded like 4 times before they even started the process. In the end luckily the pending charged never went through so the dispute was closed “in my favor” somewhat.

> But whipping out your phone sucks compared to just tapping your card against a reader.

And I’d have said whipping out my card sucks compared to using the watch that’s already on my hand. (Of course that works with my other cards as well)

I absolutely love paying via my watch. Only issues I have had is related to random “card updates” which delay the process a bit. Happens maybe once or twice in 2-3 month span.

I'd considered not wearing my apple watch every few weeks then I remember how cool it is to hop in the car, forget my phone and wallet and still be able to pay for things.

Or being able to pay for stuff at resorts/pools without worrying about losing my card.

Apple Pay is the killer app for the watch for sure.

I don't really understand how whipping out your phone is harder than whipping out your card even if you don't have a watch. In my case I gave up carrying the cards at all a few years back and pay for everything on my phone anyway; the convenience of not needing a wallet or any cards at all is high.

No authentication and you’re holding out a lighter object. If the NFC terminal is further back on the counter the cashier is more comfortable taking your card and tapping it.

(I love paying via watch but I think it’s good that most cards now do the same.)

The steps to pay with Apple Pay are you have to take out your phone, double click the button on the side, confirm you want to pay, have it scan your face or do a fingerprint scan, then hold the phone waiting for it to confirm "client side" - plus Apple Pay isn't as widely supported as the "tap to pay" method which has a simple logo you can look for without having to discuss it with the cashier.

Whipping out a much smaller, lighter rectangle and simply tapping it on the reader and putting it back in your pocket takes less than a second

I thought that Apple Pay is always accepted at the same places where you can tap to pay. Is there a difference? This mentions it can be used anywhere that the contactless payments symbol is.

https://support.apple.com/en-lamr/guide/iphone/iphbd4cf42b4/...

I honestly cannot remember the last time I physically used a card to pay. I think I’ve exclusively used Apple Pay all year… (UK)

Paying with your phone is pretty ubiquitous here.

The US only got tap to pay widely in cards fairly recently, and you'll still run into a lot of point-of-sale systems that aren't properly configured or broken.

I was last in the US in October and it seems like tap to pay has gone ubiquitous there. I live in Mexico and it's available on maybe 5% of credit card terminals I use

Most of the terminals have the tap-to-pay icon, but in my area maybe 75% work. It's a bit of a crapshoot. You go to do it and the clerk'll say "oh it's broken".

Gas stations are worse. Maybe 1/3 in my area have pumps that support it.

I've had the Apple card since it was launched and have had one or two fraudulent charges, they were trivially easy to resolve, everything occurred via iMessage for Business.

I don't mean to diminish your negative experience, but it's not universal.

> The card itself was just not competitive in terms of rewards. The UI/UX of the app and the deeper integration into the Apple ecosystem was nice... (if a bit confusing) but when I moved over to Chase I found myself not really missing it at all.

The Apple rewards were quite a bit more generous than my previous card. I just looked at the Chase CC landing page and the rewards didn't look any better than my Apple Card. Which Chase card did you move to?

>I don't mean to diminish your negative experience, but it's not universal.

I mean, there were enough complaints about the dispute process (both the outcomes and the slow timelines) that Apple forced a policy change around it: https://9to5mac.com/2022/02/11/apple-card-disputes-transacti...

This isn't just sour grapes that I had a bad experience, it's a genuine reputation they developed. Compared to other companies that have much easier dispute resolution processes.

>Which Chase card did you move to?

Chase Sapphire Preferred, which has a sign on bonus (after minimum spend) worth $750. These companies with established rewards programs let you leverage points in ways that vastly outstrip their raw "cash" value. You can end up booking much more in travel etc... than if you were to just convert it to cash back.

It's not as simple and straightforward as the Apple Card, but it's also not rocket science. I generally just pay for all my expenses with the card and accrue reward points.

> because they wanted to promote using Apple Pay

This is because Apple (and Google, in the case of Google Pay) take a small small cut for each of those NFC transactions (somewhere like 15 basis points iirc, charged to the issuing card network).

I have a friend with the apple card and there was a bunch of fraud.

I think once before the replacement card even arrived.

I was just confused how this could this even happen? as far as I can tell, apple pay doesn't have a specific card number to type into the internet.

One possible reason is that Apple wants to build more fintech products that they still need a banking partner for, and don't want to launch anything new with Goldman since they know the partnership hasn't worked out. So it may just be easier to start the process to find a new partner so you don't slow down product launches.

Source: pure speculation

My guess is the although Apple got great terms on the deal leading GS to lose money, they had a reputational risk with GS since the service was poor and GS had no incentive to invest in improving it.

As market get saturated with Apple devices and new sales are lower becoming finance company can keep generating growth and returns wall is street looking for.

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