Apple’s Patent Application Reveals Its Intentions About P2P Payments

After successfully launching Apple Pay, Apple seems to be taking an interest in the P2P payment segment as well.

According to a patent filed in December, Apple’s P2P payment service seems to extend to messengers, phone calls, emails, and calendar events!

While Apple has not made any official comment in response to the rumors, the patent application did reveal the possibility of using some innovative ways to facilitate P2P payments.

The patent application included clauses like “the device may display a communication method affordance 560 indicating the phone number that the financial institution should call for the further verification to link the payment account,” among other interesting bits.

The range of payment options will certainly give Apple’s P2P a competitive advantage over other popular P2P payment options available in the market such as PayPal’s Venmo, Square Cash, Facebook Messenger and SnapCash.

People close to the subject rumored that Apple’s P2P service will work pretty similar to the other P2P services, where users will be able to make transactions by sending payments to other users via the Apple Pay network. Although the details about the service is not yet clear, sources said that Apple is discussing the service framework with its banking partners.

One source mentioned that the list of banks included JPMorgan Chase, Capital One, Wells Fargo and U.S. Bancorp.

P2P was the most exciting growth areas in the payment industry in 2015, wherein PayPal gained ownership of Venmo with its $2.1 billion achieved in mobile payments. However, according to industry experts, the P2P genre did not prove to be very profitable for most of the companies involved due to lower margins.

Regardless, most P2P providers are doing it to make inroads into a potential profitable market demographics with their services. People from the 18 – 34 age group are the largest users of P2P payments and getting the foot in this door could mean a lot of third party merchant transactions that could yield profits later on.