1y ago

Apple Cash will offer virtual card numbers for online shopping

www.engadget.com

26 comments

You can get this from privacy.com but in my experience they never work with sites you really want them to, credit card processors have a list of their prefixes or something. Hopefully Apple can pull it off.
- Privacy dot com sells data
  
  Thanks for the heads up.
- Capital one (CC) has eno, which is virtual cards. I create a new one for every website... Works good. Every now and then someone will change how they charge (name) and break the virtual card. I've got well over 100 virtual cards.
  
  I actually keep very few virtual cards. I usually use them and then delete them; unless it's a recurring charge, or a frequent online use, I figure there's no reason to let them hang out since you can just make a new one if you need it.
  
  I should probably do a walk through and wipe out ones I'm not going to reuse. But I'd say most of them will likely be used again. I will say that when I had a charge I couldn't figure out what it was the person at Capitol One said a LOT of people deactivate the virtual cards unless they plan to use them lowering the chance of a charge.
  
  TBF, I got a finger wagged at me when I missed a recurring-fee cancellation date and I had only locked the card instead of deleting it. It notified the fraud department and they (claimed in the email notifying me that they) locked my entire card out and had to call them to remove the lock. They then went through the "you should remember to cancel" speech and recommended deleting the number instead of locking it. C1's customer service is, generally, trash compared to Amex and Chase so I shouldn't be surprised that they're a bit overzealous in how to handle a locked card. Still, it's a worthwhile feature.
- A lot of retailers don’t like prepaid credit cards because they’re an easy tool for fraud / money laundering. I wonder if Apple is going to be able to tighten things up so they can have this treated like the prepaid debit cards many states use for unemployment insurance.
- Yeah, I wonder if Apple can do better, especially with their market power.
- Mysudo also offers this service. I'm looking currently looking at them to get phone numbers for banking and such.
- Privacy.com is also US only.
  So is Apple Cash, but I have more hopes of Apple expanding that to other parts of the world, as their US-only services don’t usually stay that way for too long.
  
  Considering Apple Card has been US exclusive for many years now, I wouldn't get my hopes up for Apple Cash.
  
  You need to have a partnership with a bank to run Apple Card in another region, it’s not a simple thing to expand. However Apple Pay was US exclusive for a long time and it still expanded. I think it’s possible, I just think the fact that Goldman pulled out in the US has delayed their expansion plans.
  
  Apple Pay by itself is basically a "proxy" to your existing credit card. With Apple Cash, where do you think your funds are "stored"? You'll need to partner with a bank as well (similar to how PayPal is also a bank).
  
  Oh yeah I know, I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. More clearly:
  Apple Card is slow to expand because of the requirement to have a bank partner in the region you want to expand to, and Goldman pulling out of the Apple Card partnership has probably delayed the expansion plans because stabilizing the US operations are probably the priority.
  Apple Pay didn’t expand for years because they were stabilizing relationships in the US and convincing partner networks to give them their cut, which eventually they did.
  I suspect once operations are stable, they will start to expand Apple Card and Apple Pay Cash.
  Expanding Apple Pay Cash is way easier though, because it’s stored value. That’s business that everyone wants to be in. They’re just holding your cash and earning interest on it. Apple Card is more complicated because there is debt and risk.
  The incentive to expand to Canada specifically is low as well because “cash apps” like CashApp, Venmo, etc have no presence here because we have a robust, fast and free Interac e-transfer system which is so embedded, people paying $1 to send money isn’t much of a market.
  I still think we’ll see it eventually, but yeah I’m not holding my breath.
  
  Makes sense.
  But yeah, I don't even see it on the horizon. Even features Apple should have full control over take years to become available in more than a handful of countries. For example, AI sentence completion is only available in English and a handful of other languages. Voicemail live transcriptions are US only afaik. The list goes on. Apple has a page somewhere listing what's available in which countries and there's definitely a sizable amount of features absent from non-US markets.
  Oh well, I guess we got updated Maps and "street view" in my country, so that's something.
  
  You’re not missing out. I tried it with AliExpress, and a few others large online retailers with no luck. It worked with Backblaze, but I just sort of gave up after that… it’s not really something useful if it’s not accepted by most.

26 comments