Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook could push deeper into our wallets after coronavirus

If the Corona virus The pandemic finally subsides and we can rejoin society. Many of us will go through our ritual personal pat-down before heading out to make sure we have our keys and phone. What we may not need is our wallet.

Apple, Google, Samsung, Facebook, Amazon and many others are currently taking over ours Finances. The utopian paradise they promise would finally get rid of the wallets and purses filled with plastic and plastic. They are replaced by a number of apps such as Apple Wallet, Samsung Pay and Google Pay. For many of these companies, it is only a matter of time.

“We love this type of problem,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook when Apple Pay was launched in 2014. “That’s exactly what Apple does best.”

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Apple Card: 3 months later

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Six years later, we’re closer to Apple’s vision than ever. All major credit cards work with digital wallets from Apple, Google and Samsung. Flight tickets too. More than 15% of everyone Starbucks ordered are coming from phones now, the company said in January. Governments around the world are slowly preparing to offer driving licenses for our phones.

And more is coming. According to reports from the Wall Street Journal last year, Google and Amazon are working to develop “checking account-like” products. Google is to work with Citigroup and create a local credit union a debit card that can keep up with the Apple Cardwhile Amazon is Talks with banks like JPMorgan Chase. Apple has partnered with Goldman Sachs for the Apple Card launched last year.

Facebook meanwhile wants to replace the banks as a whole with his Libra Project. The digital money, which was developed using bitcoin-like cryptocurrency technology, is designed to offer people an easier way to save and spend money, especially without a bank account and in poorer countries.

For many of us, the convenience of digitizing your wallets means more than throwing away the plastic we all carry around. It offers the ability to wipe out physical money at a time when the coronavirus pandemic is spreading without being held back by a vaccine or therapeutic drug. This way you can avoid being caught in the store without the right reward card or ID.

Analysts say there is something for many technology companies too. The more we use these services, the more likely we are to stay with the companies we trust to manage our money.

We also leave mountains of data behind when we travel somewhere or pay for something. It enables companies to learn what type of food we like, when we want to buy it, whether we tend to eat out on certain days of the week or stay at home. People’s shopping habits can even Reveal information about your personalityB. whether we have no self-control, are more civil or have health problems.

“Many companies make money with this data,” he said Dayna Ford, an analyst who tracks the payments world at Gartner. In the past, credit card companies sold spending data to analytics companies and retailers to learn consumer behavior. However, tech companies recognize that they can only collect this data themselves if they offer their own payment service instead.

“You can make your devices smarter,” she said. All you have to do is convince us to use it.

Trust and technology

Our first real impression of digital wallets started with PayPal, which was founded two decades ago as a part-security, part-finance company and promised easy money transfers over the Internet. Its ease of use made it a must among people who buy and sell items on eBay.

Fast forward to date, and the list of ways to link your finances to large technology companies is huge and growing.

The leading device manufacturers all have “pays”, whether Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay or Amazon Pay. PayPal meanwhile bought the popular social money app Venmo as part of one $ 800 million acquisition in 2013. The Venmo and Square money transfer app is one of the most popular ways to send money to each other today.

The growth of these apps is just the latest sign that people are looking for big tech to manage their money. McKinsey industry researchers found in a 2019 poll that this was just 35% of respondents Trust Facebook to meet their financial needs, more than half trust Apple and Google, and 65% trust Amazon.

And the more trust tech companies can build, the more likely we will keep coming back to them to buy more devices and services.

Apple is perhaps the most dramatic example of this. Data protection is an important feature of the Apple Card. Marketing, press conferences and the company’s terms of use vow not to share customer information with other companies or to use it for purposes other than fraud detection and account management.

Cook often states that products like Apple Pay, Apple Card, and iPhone are the company’s key products and not advertisements. “You are not our product,” he said.

Other companies seem to be following Apple’s example and integrating technologies that they believe make their financial products safe and relatively easy to use. This makes it much easier for us to throw away our wallets when digital driver’s licenses start will appear in the next few years.