Wall Street Journal on Apple Pay fees and bank pushback

Wall Street Journal:

When Apple Pay launched, the tech giant got big banks including JPMorgan Chase & Co., Capital One Financial Corp. and Bank of America Corp. to agree to pay fees that would allow their cardholders to pay by iPhone. But some banks have grown unhappy with the costs, especially after Apple Inc. introduced its own new credit card in 2019, according to people familiar with the matter.

A proposed change:

Currently, banks pay Apple a fee when their cardholders use Apple Pay. Under the planned new process, the fees wouldn’t apply on automatic recurring payments such as gym memberships and streaming services.

Sounds like this change is not yet set in concrete.

The article also digs into the specifics on fees:

Banks agreed to pay Apple 0.15% of each purchase made by their credit cardholders. (They pay a separate fee on debit-card transactions.) Those fees account for most of the revenue that Apple makes from its digital wallet, according to people familiar with the matter.

Interestingly, the fees are specific to Apple:

The terms had the potential to be uniquely lucrative for Apple. Banks don’t pay fees to Google for its wallet.

Feels like a significant amount of tension in the bank / Apple Pay model.