Apple Pay is a very comfortable, useful and practical service. Apple knows this, and that’s why it wants to improve it even more. Not only will you be able to pay with your phone, but now also, Apple can finance your purchases in four installments with Apple Pay Later. But for Apple to grant you that financing, there is a fine print that you may not like.
Apple and its transition to finance
Apple Pay Later will be an additional service within Apple Pay. If until now, we have been able to add our credit card and pay with our iPhone, now Apple will also offer the possibility of being able to pay for a purchase in four installments, for six weeks and without interest for customers. This service is backed by Apple 100%. There are no third-party companies that provide the money for financing, Apple itself is the one who puts up the money.
In principle it sounds good: without interest, in 4 installments, Apple takes care of everything and therefore our data will not be in the hands of other banks… But, if Apple is not a bank, is it?How will Apple know that we are solvent? and we can pay the four installments of Apple Pay Later?. This is where the less pretty part begins.
So they will know that you are solvent
The 9to5Mac news portal explains that “Apple will use previous hardware and service expenses to assess the solvency of customers. This means that customers with a good history of spending in stores, on their Apple devices, will have a better chance of being accepted into this service, since the company will use it as a reliability indicator when granting the loan”. So yes, Apple will make use of our spending and purchase history on the iPhone as a measure to know if we can pay.
For the company, the more you buy and spend, the better and more reliable. In addition, they explain in 9to5Mac that our spending data will be tracked with the Apple ID and, automaticallythe Apple Pay Later option will appear when we are going to use Apple Pay.
But what can happen if you stop paying any of those four installments of Apple Pay Later? First of all, you are going to stop having access to the service. We don’t know for how long and we also do not know if there will be (or not) surcharges or economic sanctions for failing to pay. In addition, it could be the case that certain features or functions of our Apple ID remain disabled until our accounts are corrected.
Apple Pay Later is a service that differs from Apple Card. In the US, Apple has a collaboration with Goldman Sachs, and offers a bank card with which it is possible to obtain financing and cashback in specific situations. Apple Pay Later is not a bank card with a third party entity. It is a function integrated in the iPhone, which it is already disabled in the code of the Wallet app in iOS 16.3. Apple can activate it at any time if they want, but they haven’t announced any official release date yet.
