BackApple offers ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ service testing to retail employees
Apple Pay Later was first announced in last June and planned to be released last September as part of iOS 16.
PremiumApple Inc has expanded an internal test of its upcoming and long-awaited feature ‘buy now, pay later’ service to the company's thousands of retail employees. The service is called Apple Pay Later, according to Bloomberg news.
This week, the company has contacted retail staffers and offered them a test version of the service which will allow shoppers to split the payment for purchases into installments, said Apple workers who asked not to be identified.
The company had previously rolled out a test for corporate employees. Apple Pay Later was first announced in last June and planned to be released last September as part of iOS 16.
However, the service was delayed until 2023 after technical challenges, Bloomberg reported. The service will run on a new financial platform that Apple designed for in-house initiatives.
It is said that the service will vault Apple into a fast-growing financial market, however, it has already faced several setbacks.
The company has used a similar rollout strategy with past financial products. In 2019, it introduced the Apple Card credit card to retail staff about a month before a public debut, as per a Bloomberg report.
The first version of the ‘Google Pay Later’ service will allow consumers to split a purchase made through Apple Pay into four installments paid over six weeks, without interest or fees.
The tech also has been developing a version of the service called Apple Pay Monthly Installments, working with Goldman Sachs Group Inc., that will split up the cost of large transactions over several months with interest. That offering hasn’t been announced yet.
To launch Apple Pay Later, the iPhone maker set up a wholly-owned subsidiary called Apple Financing LLC. That allows the Cupertino, California-based company to handle lending itself, sidestepping partners. Apple has about 270 stores in the US and more than 80,000 employees across the country, letting the company quickly test the feature with a large population.
(With Bloomberg inputs)
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