Apple’s iOS 11 will release this week on Tuesday, September 19th. A new feature being introduced is the ability to use Apple Pay to pay friends with a simple text. Dubbed the ‘Venmo Killer’, text payments are free, apparently even when paying with debit or credit card, according to Time.
Time notes: There also doesn’t appear to be an additional fee for credit card transactions made with the payment tool. On Venmo and Square Cash, users who link up their credit cards to the app instead of their bank accounts pay a 3% fee on the money they send through the app.
When you get paid, your money is securely kept in Apple Pay Cash and instantly available for you to transfer to your bank account, send to someone, or spend with Apple Pay.
Person to person payments and Apple Pay Cash are available only in the U.S. on iPhone SE, iPhone 6 or later, iPad Pro, iPad (5th generation), iPad Air 2, iPad mini 3 or later, and Apple Watch. Account security checks may require additional time to make funds available.
The video shown on Time (pictured above) shows clearly that there aren’t any fees, though I’m not sure as to the source of that video.
I don’t consider this a scalable way of racking up credit card point, and wouldn’t recommend scaling regardless, but it’s a free way of paying friends without having to disclose bank or debit card information, and racking up a few credit card points along the way as well. I expect there’ll be some ingrained limits to prevent people from overusing the credit card feature.
Time mentions that this feature will become available as an update to iOS 11 sometime this fall, not initially at launch.
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