Apple Pay coming to iMessage in iOS 11, letting you pay chat contacts; money received will go on your Apple debit card, which can offload to bank account
Kevin Kelleher / VentureBeat :
Context & Ripple Effects
This announcement closes a two-year loop: reports of Apple in talks with US banks over a person-to-person service surfaced in late 2015, with the stated aim of partnering with banks to avoid money transmitter licenses, and Recode reported this spring that prepaid Visa debit cards were part of the plan. The iOS 11 reveal confirms both threads — payments live inside Messages, and received funds land on an Apple-issued card that offloads to a bank account.
First-order effects
- Venmo, Square Cash, Zelle, and PayPal gain a rival preinstalled on every iPhone: Apple can put P2P payments one tap away inside iMessage without asking users to download anything.
- The partner banks get transaction volume routed through their infrastructure while Apple sidesteps money-transmitter licensing — the exact structure its 2015 talks were designed to produce.
Second-order effects
- PayPal and Venmo had already moved to instant bank transfers weeks before this announcement, explicitly citing Apple's iMessage entry — expect further fee and speed concessions to defend their P2P base.
- Messaging platforms become payment battlegrounds: Facebook Messenger had already added PayPal alongside debit cards, so each chat network now needs a payments partner or loses ground where conversations happen.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, default chat apps rather than standalone wallets become the primary P2P rail, and control of the receiving card — here Apple's own debit product — becomes the new choke point for customer relationships banks once owned outright.
The trend: Peer-to-peer payments are migrating from standalone apps like Venmo into the messaging platforms users already have open, with OS owners using preinstallation to take share.