The central business problem for retail banks is how to earn more from deposits than they pay in interest, and to do so at a scale of billions of dollars. Apple also needs to figure out how to make money from its pile of cash. Accepting deposits and becoming a bank would only make that problem worse - so how is "having lots of cash" evidence that Apple wants to be a bank?
An investment bank is a different animal and I would strongly disagree with the author that Apple is a "de facto investment bank". Investment banks advise clients on financial transactions and help clients hedge risk (something Apple doesn't do).
There are much more straightforward and compelling explanations for why Apple cares about security (as others in this thread have pointed out).
The only thing I would slightly agree with is that Apple maybe has an eye toward building its own payments network (a payments network is NOT a bank, by the way). But Apple isn't even CLOSE to competing with Visa and MasterCard in that regard - even if it did disintermediate the credit card companies it would have to have much much larger consumer adoption of Apple Pay plus a merchant network.
Honestly the tone and muddled structure of this article come off as a poorly substantiated conspiracy theory.
The central business problem for retail banks is how to earn more from deposits than they pay in interest, and to do so at a scale of billions of dollars. Apple also needs to figure out how to make money from its pile of cash. Accepting deposits and becoming a bank would only make that problem worse - so how is "having lots of cash" evidence that Apple wants to be a bank?
An investment bank is a different animal and I would strongly disagree with the author that Apple is a "de facto investment bank". Investment banks advise clients on financial transactions and help clients hedge risk (something Apple doesn't do).
There are much more straightforward and compelling explanations for why Apple cares about security (as others in this thread have pointed out).
The only thing I would slightly agree with is that Apple maybe has an eye toward building its own payments network (a payments network is NOT a bank, by the way). But Apple isn't even CLOSE to competing with Visa and MasterCard in that regard - even if it did disintermediate the credit card companies it would have to have much much larger consumer adoption of Apple Pay plus a merchant network.
Honestly the tone and muddled structure of this article come off as a poorly substantiated conspiracy theory.