Inside Apple's efforts to develop new financial services, which have suffered from slow progress and missed deadlines due to engineering and technical setbacks
Apple's slate of new financial services — including “buy now, pay later” offerings, savings accounts and an iPhone subscription program — have hit delays.
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple is trying to become its own lender rather than a storefront for banks' products. The pivot point was June 2022, when the company set up in-house subsidiary Apple Financing LLC to run credit checks and make loan decisions for Apple Pay Later — a first for a company that had previously left balance-sheet risk with partners.
That structure explains why the current delays sting: Bloomberg reports the pay-later offering, savings accounts, and an iPhone subscription program have all slipped on engineering and technical setbacks. Underwriting is also uncharted territory — reporting since then says Apple plans to score Pay Later borrowers on spending history, owned devices, and Apple Card applications rather than traditional credit bureau data, so every delay pushes back the moment that proprietary risk model gets tested at scale.
First-order effects
- Apple Financing LLC sits idle longer than planned: until Pay Later ships, the subsidiary created to originate loans has no book to manage, and Apple cedes more BNPL ground to incumbents like Affirm and Klarna.
Second-order effects
- Partners who might otherwise supply these rails — card issuers, banking-as-a-service vendors, credit bureaus — lose the revenue Apple's scale would bring if the in-house stack keeps slipping, while rivals gain time to lock up distribution Apple would have disrupted.
Third-order effects
- If Apple does get its own underwriting working on device-and-spending signals instead of bureau scores, it points toward consumer finance being priced by platform data — a structural threat to lenders whose models depend on credit-file data Apple doesn't need.
The trend: Consumer platforms are verticalizing financial services in-house, but Apple's missed deadlines show how much harder originating credit is than distributing it.