Apple has slowly built a financial services giant position around its digital wallet for storing a user’s payment cards and launching its own Apple card in 2019. Today, at Apple’s spring event, the company announced the newer chapter in that story: the launch of the Apple Card Family, which will allow partners / spouses to build a common credit and give family members over the age of 13 access to the use of the Apple Card.
Apple Card Family will first be released in the US in May, after users updated the latest version of iOS, Apple said today.
The timing of the announcement is interesting. Last month, Apple and its Goldman Sachs partner were removed from any gender bias in how they create credit scores on the Apple Card, a lengthy investigation that has been going on for almost as long as the Apple Card itself.
At the time of the ruling, even though Apple was removed, the regulator noted that what highlighted the case was the more endemic gender and other disparities in the credit rating system, especially with regard to spouses and partners.
Given this, some might say that today’s announcement doesn’t come as a surprise, and others might say it’s been a long time.
This service announcement seems to be the company’s effort to seal the transaction and draw a line under that story and to more formally state its intentions to be fair, even if the regulations failed to recover them.
“It simply came to our notice then [of launching Apple Card] there was a lack of fairness in the way the industry calculated credit scores when there were two credit card holders, ”CEO Tim Cook said today. “One of you benefited from building a good credit history, and the other did not. We want to reinvent the way this works. ”
(Also, it’s no surprise on another level: iOS 14.5 developer previews have revealed that Apple is building multi-user support for Apple Cards, laying the groundwork for common adult accounts and wider family use.)
As Cook described it, spouses and partners will be allowed to share and unite their credit lines with equal rights on their account, in order to “build credit equally.”
“This solution helps achieve financial equity and changes the game,” he said. Indeed, in cases where either one partner has outstanding debts or has lost part of that debt or does not have the same earning power, this move is a way to give one partner’s stronger spending power to another, in cases where the partners combine their finances anyway. It makes sense and, honestly, it’s been a long time.
In the meantime, the ability to give Apple Card access to people over the age of 13 will come with spending limits if you want to enter them, along with other controls over how it can be used.
This is also smart, an extension of how Apple has built a role as a “responsible” technology company, with privacy controls for all users and parental controls for devices, and now adds a new angle, becoming an educational tool.
Many parents are turning to technology and applications to build more funding among their children, so it makes sense for Apple to position itself as a partner in this effort.
While it allows families to manage their finances more equitably, there is, of course, another more business-oriented strategy here: it clearly gives Apple a much larger group of potential consumers who use the Apple card, using services such as Daily Cash (which offers up to 3% of every cash purchase on users’ Apple Cash card every day) and access to use the secure titanium Apple card that comes without a visible card number, CVV security code, expiration date or signature.
On this subject, we do not know how many people use the Apple card today. Cook simply called the Apple Card, which has been estimated to be used by more than 3.1 million people since March 2020, “the most successful credit card launch ever.”
