Excuse the imperfect illustration. I’m in a bit of a hurry today after my whirlwind trip to Ohio. More on that later. This week I want to give Apple Inc. some advice. Not that they need it.
The thing that has made Apple the successful company they are is that they have built things that are new and better than what was there before. The iPod, the iPhone and the iPad each changed the world. Not so much the Apple Watch or Apple TV yet. My suggestion is that they spend some of their 25 billion dollars of cash to revolutionize the banking industry. They have all of the parts in place. Apple pay works but isn’t in enough places to be ubiquitous yet. Spend the money to get retailers to install the hardware. Give them a big discount off the three percent or so taken by the credit card companies. On the user end give customers incentives to use Apple Pay: Frequent Buyer Points or just discounts. Spend the money and disrupt the banking industry before they even know what hit them. Be prepared for the congressional hearings that are bound to follow.
Visa and Mastercard are money machines for their owners the banks and they are an attackable monopoly. Spend the money and change the world…again.