Apple Not Planning to Disrupt Credit Card Industry With Mobile Payments

It would be easy to think that Apple wants to wipe out, or at least change, the credit card industry thanks to its mobile payments tool, Apple Pay. A new report, featuring comment from vice president and head of Apple Pay Jennifer Bailey, suggests that Apple has no interest in being the next big thing in credit cards.

While at the Brainstorm Reinvent conference in Chicago, Bailey laid out Apple’s stance in an interview with Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky. Therein, she expressed a stance that made it clear Apple was not out to replace Mastercard at all, but rather, be a useful complement to the credit card industry as a whole.

If Apple were merely a complementary good, a way to take a good or service and make it better, it stood to land some extra value with minimal difficulty. If it tried to replace the credit card, though, it would have become—at least de facto—a financial institution that required a full-on bank charter. That would have brought regulatory muscle into play, muscle that Apple had no interest in tackling itself.

Apple’s focus, therefore, is largely one of access. It’s already looking to go beyond Apple Pay with a new line of student ID cards that it will be offering for three schools: the University of Alabama, the University of Oklahoma, and Duke University. The new ID cards will not only offer a payments tool, but also work with near-field communications (NFC) tools to serve as building access.

It’s not surprising that Apple never wanted to be a credit card. Why would it? After all, it stands to make good money as it is, processing payments and effectively carrying water for credit cards. Apple Pay has worked with a credit card connection pretty much since its emergence, and with new possibilities like the college ID concept and similar concepts rolled out in some hotels recently, Apple has plenty of room to carry on without doing something that would immediately push it into regulatory field of view.

Apple has an excellent position now as a mobile payments alternative that improves the credit card, and it will likely be able to make plenty of hay while this sun continues to shine.