Goldman Sach’s Apple Card is a fine product, which seamlessly integrates into an iPhone. It works smoothly, has excellent customer service, and has a shiny metallic card. GS’s version indeed outperforms Apple Card 1.0, a product no longer offered by Barclaycard US.
My personal Apple Card sits in the family safe; though the Apple Wallet version is slick, the un-contactless card is of little use other than to show my adult kids how hip I am with the latest credit product.
Mobile devices matured so well in the past 20 years that the latest claims do little more than make advances into photo technology, or as Apple illustrates in its latest release of the iPhone 12 with a “stunning new purple” model. Sounds great if you like purple, but it does little for the functionality of the device. And, shouldn’t that phone be in a nice case, anyway?
Now comes the latest announcement on the Apple Card.
Previous claims on the novelty of daily rewards proved to be lackluster. If your card-spend averages $25,000 per year, your real opportunity would be <$500. That suggests all of $1.39 per day, using the standard 360-year calculation method. Sometimes the math says, use your American Express Blue card, to get 6% back at grocery stores or your Discover iT card when the verticals are right in their rotating 5% markets.
Tim Cook announced Apple Family. It sounds new, but the concept is not novel. First, adding an authorized user is not new; most established credit card issuers offered the feature back in the 1980s. You can set up an authorized user with most credit cards today, and many times credit card issuers will give you points or rewards for adding a user.
I’ve done it personally with my three children; adding them to the card helps establish their credit without having card liability. I’d bet my kids’ FICO scores are better than yours when they graduated college. Unless you lock their authorized card in the family safe, too, keep an eye on spending for pizza and beer.
PaymentSource’s headline grabs attention, noting that “Apple Card now lets multiple family members share a credit line.” We commented that sharing credit scores may be another issue and suggested that:
- The lawyers at Apple certainly had to check the Fair Credit Reporting Act to see if credit lines could actually be switched, or in this case, merged because you generally can’t transfer scores.
- You’re negating the primary credit score on the account, and the other thing is that FICO is the driving factor on most credit scores, and there are also limitations on marital status, so does that get invoked here?
Over at American Express, I can do the same in two clicks. Bank of America, Citi, Chase and Discover require the same simple effort.
Apple knows how to market, that is for sure. In this case, Apple is respinning an old credit card feature. They will not be able to share credit scores; however, they revitalize another old concept with account-level controls, so maybe you can do it and keep the pizza and beer charges off your student’s buying habits.
Overview provided by Brian Riley, Director, Credit Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group
