iOS 11 Features: Apple Pay Cash Card, Person-to-Person Payments Announced At WWDC 2017

Craig Federighi, Apple's vice president of engineering, announced at the Worldwide Developer’s Conference on Monday that Apple Pay will soon support a new feature on iOS 11: direct person-to-person payments through iMessage. The feature will be available later this year, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions about how it will work.

The Verge reported money will transfer to something called an “Apple Pay Cash Card" although it remains to be seen if that card will connect directly to the user’s bank account or just his or her Apple Pay account. Fortune reported the service will be nearly identical to PayPal’s Venmo app, which reportedly processed $6.8 billion in the first quarter of 2017.

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These peer-to-peer apps are especially popular with young people, who use them for everything from swapping rent among roommates to repaying friends for group outings like a restaurant bill. Rather than getting several checks, it’s become commonplace for one person to pay the bill and the rest to Venmo their portions to that user. Assuming both users have Apple Pay accounts, this feature could make Apple Pay even more convenient than Venmo.

Even before Venmo came on the scene, Forrester Research estimated person-to-person payments would reach $17 billion by 2019. Google Wallet enabled peer-to-peer money transfers in 2015 while competing apps like Samsung Pay are still working to make person-to-person payment options widely available. Person-to-person payments are now officially a standard feature of mobile financial services. Even California’s Redwood Credit Union, with less than 300,000 members, now facilitates direct money transfers through a mobile app.

This new mobile feature comes as part of a wider push as Apple Pay strives to rise above competing apps. Apple Pay recently expanded partnerships with 21 banks across the U.S. and launched in Italy. The tech company also eliminated Apple Pay’s spending limit for the majority of participating United Kingdom retailers, which was originally intended to prevent fraud. The mobile app is particularly popular with fashion retailers. A survey by Boston Retail Partners suggests 22 percent of retailers who don’t already accept Apple Pay plan to start in 2017. Federighi said Monday that Apple Pay will be available at half of American retailers by the end of the year.

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