In 2020, a clandestine collaboration between Apple and Goldman Sachs emerged, aiming to introduce a feature facilitating the buying and selling of stocks through Apple’s ecosystem. However, due to an increasingly volatile financial landscape aggravated by rising interest rates, inflation, and plummeting stocks like Tesla and even Apple itself, the investing feature was suspended. The fear of potential backlash if users sustained losses using their product spurred Apple towards focusing on savings accounts, a safer proposition in a landscape of high interest rates.
Goldman Sachs’ recent decision to mostly pull out of consumer banking initiatives has left the destiny of the stock trading project hanging in the balance. Despite this, insiders imply that the groundwork is laid for the investing feature, should Apple opt to revisit it. The Apple-Goldman Sachs alliance has already birthed significant financial products like the Apple Card, buy now, pay later (BNPL) loans, and a high-yield savings account, which gathered over $10 billion in user deposits just last month.
Entering the stock trading sphere would position Apple against old hands such as Robinhood, SoFi, and Square as well as traditional brokerage agencies like Charles Schwab and Morgan Stanley’s E-Trade. It’s worth noting that Robinhood and SoFi have also expanded their offerings to include crypto trading. The company’s reported concerns about trading turbulence likely would have been intensified in the digital currency market, where Bitcoin and Ethereum – the closest approximations of “blue chip” crypto assets – fell 65% and 67% respectively last year. This might have resulted in increased regulatory scrutiny. For instance, the Securities and Exchange Commission has already launched actions against over 20 crypto companies this year.
The probability of Apple jumping on the crypto trading wagon was nebulous, with potential complications such as its earlier confrontations with authorities over its App Store practices, and accusations against trading apps of overly simplifying or ‘gamifying’ the markets. Other tech titans have ventured into similar pathways, with Elon Musk‘s X partnering with eToro to enable stock and crypto purchases, and PayPal contemplating stock trading before reverting focus to its primary e-commerce enterprise. It seems digital trading is an inevitable facet of the future financial landscape, but, for now, the question of Apple partaking in this space remains undetermined.
Source: Cryptonews
