As a battle for the peer-to-peer payments market brews, a war of words has already seen its first shots, with PayPal CEO Dan Schulman waving away any threat posed by a new service Apple is set to launch this fall in an interview with The Telegraph.
The service in question is actually a new feature of Apple’s Messenger app that will let iOS users instantly send money to each other using their Apple accounts. It’s set to launch this autumn via Apple’s next big iOS update, and is expected to immediately pose a threat to PayPal’s market share, as the latter’s Venmo app currently dominates the P2P money transfer market.
Schulman isn’t worried. PayPal’s Venmo is platform agnostic – it can be used on any major operating system – while Apple’s money transfer feature, like pretty much all Apple services, is restricted to Apple devices and software; and that, Schulman argues, will hold it back, telling The Telegraph that users “want a consistency” across software and hardware when using such services.
The trash talking underscores the growing sense of rivalry between Apple and PayPal as both have sought to increase their presence in the digital transformation rocking the payments industry, and may offer a hint of how intense this competition is going to get going forward.
Source: The Telegraph
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