Apple looking to tie up with Goldman for ‘buy now, pay later’ service
Bloomberg has reported that Apple and Goldman Sachs are working together on a ‘buy now, pay later’ (BNPL) service for users of Apple products to purchase the products and pay later in instalments.
The BNPL market has been growing very fast over the last couple of years and the pandemic has only accelerated the growth of the industry as people wanted to save up their funds for such calamities and were looking for options to continue to buy products but pay for them in a limited and controlled manner.
The growth of digital payments during the same period has also helped in pushing this space further as it is easy to integrate and track such services online and on mobile rather than offline. This is why, the world over, we are seeing many payment service providers launching this option for their customers with Paypal launching a similar service in Australia just a week ago.
The potential tie-up between these 2 giants led to the tumbling of the share prices of many BNPL companies in the stock markets, especially in Australia where many such services have been launched in recent times. It is expected that Apple would be introducing this product and would be using Goldman Sachs to finance these purchases.
The sector also aligns with the millennials who seem to love this service as this gives them an opportunity to shop high-end products without the fear of them driving a hole into their pockets. The fact that this generation of users spends most of their time online and on their mobiles has also helped the payments and BNPL industry grow over the last couple of years and this is expected to continue in the future also.
It is reported that the users would need to apply for this service through the Apple iPhone wallet and verification and credit checks would be made before specific BNPL limits are given for the users. It is also believed that Apple might look to expand this service so that users would be able to use this service for purchasing other products as well through digital cards.
In recent times, we had reported that neobanks and payment service companies like Lunar and Klarna were looking to launch BNPL services and this would place them in direct competition with Apple in the coming months and this is likely to place them under a lot of pressure.
