Apple might offer peer to peer money transfers

Apple is looking to add peer-to-peer money transfer to its Apple Pay service and hopes it might help it take off.

According to a recent report by The Wall Street Journal, Apple believes adding the peer-to-peer money transfer would interest millennials, and it’s been talking to a number of banks about it.

The American tech giant has been looking into the money transfer idea for a year now, and has been discussing it with JPMorgan Chase, US Bancorp, Wells Fargo and Citi.

The reason why Apple has decided to partner up with banks instead of building its own system is to avoid filing for money transmitter licenses, people with knowledge of the program told Quartz.

By sidestepping such licenses -- which PayPal, Venmo, Facebook, and even AirBnb have -- Apple can focus on the consumer side and avoid scrutiny from regulators.

Quartz also says Apple might use its messaging app -- iMessage -- to get the service across.

"It’s already one of the most used default apps on iPhones and is especially popular with the younger crowd -- a survey by messaging service Jott found that 60 percent of teens say that it’s their preferred messaging app", QZ says in its report.

The idea is far from being new or revolutionary -- Alibaba’s AliPay and messaging app WeChat are tied, and Facebook uses its Messenger for a similar service.

The social media giant has released its payment service through Messenger back in June for the US market, allowing person-to-person payments.

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