Apple might just be about to launch a brand new Apple Pay feature that could facilitate peer-to-peer payments. Reports coming in from various quarters suggest that the Cupertino giant could well facilitate peer to peer payments as early as this year itself.
Apple has really been missing out a huge opportunity for years. While you can use it to pay for merchandise that you pick up in stores, or even purchase stuff online, for some strange reason, the company did not see fit to allow people to transact between themselves. So, say I wanted to send a buddy some money, well, Apple Pay couldn’t have helped me out there. I would have needed to resort to some other app in order to transact.
A report from Recode now suggests that Apple could be working on a feature that would allow iPhone users to send money to other iPhone users. The company has apparently been in talks with various payments industry partners and has been investigating the best way to go about introducing a payments service to the market.
While details are very scant regarding this particular service and when — and if — it would ever be introduced, it would definitely make sense to leverage all the huge audience that the iOS ecosystem enjoys.
The company could reportedly also be working on a pre-paid Visa card that will allow you to cash out and spend the money in your Apple Pay wallet without first having to send it to your bank account. That wold be pretty sweet and could actually save users a lot of trouble. Indeed, a way to keep money in your smartphone and spend if via a card would be really awesome.
Meanwhile, Apple isn’t likely to charge users for the service as hardly any of its competitors do. With that said though, it would still be a pretty great way for the company to increase awareness about Apple Pay and get more people to start using it in ways that actually benefit the Cupertino giant.
