- Apple discontinued its “buy now, pay later” service on Monday.
- The company plans to release a suite of new features for Apple Pay later this year.
- The move suggests that Apple remains interested in offering financial services to its users.
It seems Apple is still struggling to figure out the best way to revolutionize the financial industry.
On Monday, the iPhone maker told 9to5Mac that it was discontinuing its buy now, pay later service, “Apple Pay Later,” just months after it was introduced across the US.
Instead, the company is pinning its hopes on new Apple Pay features that are expected to launch later this year, including “access to installment loans made through your credit and debit cards, as well as lenders like Affirm.”
“With the launch of this new global installment loan offering, we will no longer offer Apple Pay Later in the US,” the company said in a statement to 9to5Mac.
Plans to introduce new Apple Pay services later this year show that the company still has serious ambitions to bring financial services to its user ecosystem.
After all, Apple has been busy in recent years building out a multi-billion dollar Services division that aims to serve all the digital needs of users who connect to its devices, from curating their entertainment through Apple TV+ to helping them keep track of key fitness metrics with Apple Health.
So offering a service that supports their financial needs seems like a bold but understandable ambition for CEO Tim Cook.
Still, it's rare for Apple to remove a feature as suddenly as it did Apple Pay Later, which allowed users to pay for purchases in four interest-free installments over six weeks, signaling the company's struggle to come up with a financial services solution that would gain significant traction with its user base.
This isn't the first time Apple's financial ambitions have taken a hit.
The following report was published late last year: Apple and Goldman Sachs Partnership The two companies worked together to Apple-branded credit card Following 2019 High Yield Savings Account 2023.
It's unclear whether Apple will seek new financial services partners, but that seems unlikely.
Representatives for Apple did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.
Disruption is a hard business
Apple's woes in financial services highlight the major challenges the company can face as it tries to disrupt an established industry.
The Cupertino giant has an enviable track record of disruption, from revolutionizing the music industry with the iPod and iTunes to revolutionizing mobile phones with the iPhone.
But Apple's recent attempts at innovation haven't been held to the same standards.
For one, the company's attempt at a mixed-reality headset, Apple Vision Pro, met with lackluster sales and lukewarm reviews.
And as if that wasn't enough, Apple announced in the same month that it was abandoning its electric car project after nearly a decade in the making.
The late Steve Jobs once dreamed of reinventing television, telling biographer Walter Isaacson, “It would be a television with the simplest user interface imaginable. And I finally made it happen.”
It's been more than a decade since Jobs died, and the company still hasn't released a television, but it does make a popular set-top box, Apple TV, and has launched a streaming service, Apple TV+.
To be sure, disruption is tough even for a trillion-dollar tech giant like Apple, but the company may be able to improve its chances of success by sticking to what it does best: making great technology for consumers.
While some may see Apple as a laggard in the AI space, the company has successfully captivated the market with its vision of practical, user-centric AI tools.
There's still a lot that could happen in the future, but delivering highly personalized and seamless AI services is right where Apple excels.
Correction: June 18, 2024 — An earlier version of this article misstated the year Apple began offering a high-yield savings account with Goldman Sachs. The correct date was 2023, not 2022.
