Apple’s Card Was Confusing
Also capital call line securitization, top-ticking private credit, Robinhood grows up and a Russian payment system
Who do you think would be better at designing a simple and delightful user experience for a credit card: Apple Inc., or the average bank? If you had asked me this a week ago I would have confidently said “Apple.” Banks are stereotypically confusing and legalistic; Apple is stereotypically friendly and easy to use. Apple’s whole thing is “it just works”: Instead of making you fill out pages of confusing forms, I would naively have thought, Apple would just let you choose a couple of clear options and automatically do what it was supposed to do.
But yesterday the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined Apple $25 million, and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. another $65 million, for basically designing bad user experiences for the Apple credit card that Goldman issued. And yet most banks manage to run credit card programs without getting in this sort of trouble?