After three years, the Apple Card has not left the United States and may never do so

No, we haven’t forgotten it, but everyone outside of the United States has reason to have. Three years have passed since the introduction of the Apple Card, the credit card that Apple presented together with Goldman Sachs as a boost for its payment platforms. After all this time, what changes have there been?

The Apple Card may be something we never see beyond the United States

At the level of expansion, the Apple Card has not taken any steps. It’s still a US thing, and even rumors of an upcoming expansion in Canada haven’t come to fruition. On the one hand it is understood: the credit card culture is something very inherent to Americans. Exporting the Apple Card out of there is very complicated.

But on the other hand, there were signs of expansion towards other countries that have remained a dead letter. Today there is nothing that makes us optimistic about whether we will see a credit card (or even a debit card) from Apple in Spain, Mexico and other countries.

In fact, the official website of the Apple Card itself denotes a certain forgetfulness. The iPhones that appear in the marketing images have the design of the iPhone X, XS and 11, and that means that in Cupertino they haven’t bothered to refresh the design since before the launch of the iPhone 12. That is already more than a year and a half. It does not convey good feelings.

Apple Cash (formerly Apple Pay Cash) has had the occasional timid progress more in rumors and even showed its paw in Spain, but it was more a slip of iOS than anything else. And with everyone getting used to Bizum, many have given up on Apple’s personal money transfer platform. Like the Apple Card, it remains something reserved for Americans.

Green shoots in the form of other small services

Where we have seen the odd leak and news is in the service ApplePay, which seeks to accommodate itself in the wave of installment payment services that can be contracted from the mobile. It is known of a certain ‘Apple Pay Later’, which would allow any user of the service to be able to divide a purchase into four payments comfortably and without draconian conditions.

In addition, Apple Pay has been extended to many countries to integrate with a multitude of banks: Spain, Mexico, a large part of Europe, Japan, Australia… The only setback it has experienced has been due to force majeure.

Then we have Tap to Pay, the service officially announced by Apple that will allow use the iPhone as a customer payment terminal. This seeks to position itself side by side with services like Square, which have always relied on accessories connected to the iPhone to be able to make those charges. They will soon be a thing of the past.

And here it is me venturing to elucubrate, but perhaps the future of Apple payments worldwide is not in the Apple Card. Perhaps this card has remained as something typical of the Americans, seeing that it would not succeed in the rest of the countries. Perhaps the future is to leave behind those traditional banking concepts and push those iPhone services as a collection terminal or a tool to contract installment payments. Now, I could very well be wrong because Apple has bought a bank credit reporting company in the UK. And that can be quite a sign.

Something that would support the move away from credit cards are the movements of several countries and continents to create your own digital currency, something that could be easily controlled from an iPhone. And of course, cryptocurrencies may have some influence here. After three years without changes or news in the Apple Card, Cupertino may have simply decided to wait.