Where do we use credit cards to buy stuff ? Well, for me it’s pretty much everywhere: google play, apple store, paypal, online groceries, amazon, domains, hosting, cloud platforms, software subscriptions and millions of others. Right ? We’re all on the same boat here and honestly one day delivery is something that will ruin us all 🙂
So now we associated our credit cards to Apple Pay and Google Wallet, along with Samsung and all others that do the same thing, and we started paying daily stuff with this new payment ‘app’ – which pretty much a wrapper around our credit card.
Looking at it, that’s what debit cards that banks issue are for. To do that wrapper around our account, so that we can pay daily stuff with it.
Again, this isn’t something new and for those who don’t know me, I recently worked for a Swiss mobile banking company that operated on the German market and the app is something that connected to your bank account and would open up to new services and ways of managing your money – mobile banking done right.
Also, today the WSJ has a piece about Apple having some discussions with US banks to leverage the same Apple Pay platform to start doing peer-to-peer transactions, skipping the middleman (banks). Again that’s nothing new, there are plenty of platforms out there doing the same, as they were with payments before Apple Pay, but we all know that they don’t have either the power, cash and marketing as Apple to push markets and technology.
Bottom line is that all this new technology and ways of buying offline and sending money, rely on your ‘digital account’ and that is based on our credit card – the initial method we associated to pay services. So, why do we need banks if we can just add a credit card and then do our entire life without ever to go to a cash machine, go to online banking to send money or having a debit card to pay daily expenses ?