Over the past few months, Apple has unveiled a couple of financial services, but none of them have actually launched. Apple Pay Later was announced in June 2022 and was expected to land in September of that year, but was delayed. Similarly, Apple also partnered with Goldman Sachs to offer savings accounts for Apple Card customers back in October, but this initiative has yet to materialize. Now it appears that both of these projects as well as two others have been further delayed.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has explained that two other fintech projects are currently also under development at Apple. This is a subscription program for iPhone hardware as well as an extension of the Pay Later program, called Apple Pay Monthly Installments. Both of these projects are said to have been delayed due to technical challenges.
Creating a next-generation financial platform to handle interest calculations, credit checks and rewards is apparently proving a bit too difficult for Apple. This is called Project Breakout internally.
Despite setbacks when it comes to meeting deadlines, the projects are not at a standstill. In fact, Apple Pay Later was tested with corporate employees a few weeks ago before being opened up to retail employees in some regions earlier this month. Gurman expects the feature to be generally available by March or April, without being tied to a specific iOS release. On the other hand, the release date for Apple Savings Accounts via the Goldman Sachs partnership is still unclear.
The release of Apple Pay Later is also a dependency for the unannounced Apple Pay Monthly Installments program. This initiative is intended to accommodate higher transaction amounts and requires an internal lending subsidiary. Basically, Apple will need to gauge traction for Apple Pay Later before announcing this extension.
Finally, the iPhone subscription service was actually expected in 2022 or 2023, but has yet to appear. The goal is to make it easier for customers to use expensive Apple hardware without paying a large sum upfront.
Overall, while Apple appears to be making progress in most of its fintech initiatives, recent engineering and technical challenges have deterred it from launching them publicly. That said, if the latest report is to be believed, we should see some of these services launch publicly soon.
Source: Bloomberg
