A few days ago, Apple released iOS 11.2. For those with iOS 11.2 installed, yesterday Apple turned on the Apple Pay Cash feature, which lets you send and receive money within the Messages app. Need to pay someone to split the cost of lunch, or want to send someone a request to send you a specific amount? You can now do so, and it is just as quick and easy as sending a text message. Writing a check to someone seems prehistoric compared to Apple Pay Cash.
When you receive money, it goes into your Apple Pay Cash card on your iPhone. You can keep the money in there so that you have it in the future to pay other folks using Apple Pay Cash, or use it to pay a merchant using traditional Apple Pay, or you can transfer it to your bank account. If you need to make a payment and don’t already have sufficient funds on your Apple Pay Cash card, the service will let you add money to your account from either a credit card or a debit card. If you use a credit card, Apple charges you a 3% fee, so if you owe someone $20 and you use your credit card to add the funds to Apple Pay Cash, it will cost you 60¢. But if you connect your bank’s debit card to Apple Pay Cash, then you can add money without any service fee.
I received two bucks from someone last night and then sent $2 back just to see how the process works, and it was really easy to use. Perhaps the most startling aspect of all was that for the first time, I saw a color in the Messages app other than blue or green. Messages associated with sending or receiving Apple Pay Cash are in black. When you send money, you need to confirm money using either Face ID (on an iPhone X) or Touch ID on older iPhones.
You can also send or receive money just using an Apple Watch (after you upgrade to watchOS 4.2). Or you can ask Siri to “send 25 dollars to Martin” or even “ask Martin for $22 for lunch.”
Other services like Venmo have offered something similar for a while, but because Apple Pay Cash is built-in to Messages and works with the Wallet app, and because Apple is a trusted company when it comes to preserving your privacy, Apple Pay Cash has the potential to become incredibly popular. And as more people become comfortable with using the service, it will become even more useful.
The minimum amount that you can send or receive is $1, and the maximum limit on any specific transaction is $3,000. There is also a $10,000 limit on transactions within each seven-day period, and $20,000 is the most that you can have on your Apple Pay Cash card at one time. So you probably won’t be using Apple Pay Cash for asking your clients to pay their invoices for legal services, unless it is just a small, one-off type of thing. But for sending and receiving small amounts of money between friends and family, Apple Pay Cash should be perfect.
Following Apple’s on-screen instructions for setting up Apple Pay Cash is pretty easy, but if you want some detailed step-by-step instructions for doing so, Joseph Keller of iMore wrote a helpful guide to Apple Pay Cash. And for a good overview (including some animations) showing how Apple Pay Cash works, check out this page on Apple’s website.
About Apple Cash. I’ve been using Venmo for several months to send money to my son and granddaughter Although you mention Venmo, it has one big advantage over Apple cash. It links directly to my checking account. There is no need for a credit or debit card. And no worry about whether there is sufficient money available in the Apple Cash account.
If connected to a Debit Card, isn’t that pretty much the same thing — i.e. it automatically links to the checking account? If you try to make an Apple Pay Cash payment and don’t have sufficient funds on the Apple card, it will automatically give you a button to press to deduct from your debit card i.e. your checking account. Now what it doens’t do is automatically add funds that you receive to your checking account. For me, I use Apple Pay enough for purchases that having the cash there would work fine for me, but I can understand that others might want it to always go directly into a checking account.
I’m sure that Venmo will be looking for ways to distinguish itself from Apple Pay Cash, and hopefully the competition will result in better choices for all of us.
-Jeff
Although I have iOS 11.2, Apple Pay Cash has not yet reached Hong Kong.