Apple Card Savings Account Launches
Apple (Hacker News, MacRumors):
Starting today, Apple Card users can choose to grow their Daily Cash rewards with a Savings account from Goldman Sachs, which offers a high-yield APY of 4.15 percent — a rate that’s more than 10 times the national average. With no fees, no minimum deposits, and no minimum balance requirements, users can easily set up and manage their Savings account directly from Apple Card in Wallet.
[…]
Once a Savings account is set up, all future Daily Cash earned by the user will be automatically deposited into the account.
The 10x is compared with most physical banks. There are a dozen or more online banks that offer similar rates. Ally and Amex are currently at 3.75%. Goldman Sachs’s own Marcus product is at 3.9%, slightly lower than its Apple product. Synchrony offers the same 4.15%. CIT offers 4.5%, or 4.75% on a $5,000 balance. VIO is at 4.77%. So Apple’s offering is not amazing, but it’s very good. There are probably lots of people who have been getting terrible rates because they never shopped around, and now Apple is making it really easy for them to get something much better.
It’s still unclear whether this is a fully featured bank account. Can you use it to pay your Apple Card bill? There does not seem to be a Web site.
Unless you reject the arbitration provision, you automatically:
- Give up the right to litigate claims,
- Initiate or participate in a class action
- Waive the right to be heard in court or have a jury trial.
From page 13. Worth knowing.
Peers makes it sound like all a thief needs to empty your bank account is your phone. What the Journal story made clear is that thieves need both your phone and your device passcode. That’s a big difference.
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And the new interest-paying savings accounts are just an alternative to having your Apple Card cash-back go to your Apple Cash account — which pays no interest. So if Peers has successfully spooked any Information readers from signing up for these savings accounts, all he’s succeeded in doing is keeping them from earning interest. There’s zero difference in security.
This is literally true, if you go by Apple’s current framing that this is a way to earn interest on your existing rewards balance. But presumably Apple and Goldman are thinking bigger and would like you to transfer in additional funds. Before, there was no reason to maintain a balance; now there is. Now it becomes relevant that your iPhone passcode is probably less secure and more frequently entered in public than your current banking password. Plus, the banking login may be protected by an additional factor or stored in a separate password manager with its own password.
It would have been nice if the prompt that was supposed to show up per the instructions to transfer existing Apple Cash balance actually did appear. It did not in my case.
I mostly really like the Apple Card (credit card), but there are some issues. Like today when I looked at my transactions and noticed one this morning from Ace Hardware (including showing me the local store); got worried because I haven’t been there in months; had trouble figuring out how to report it; then when I did figure it out, I noticed on that screen an important bit of info: “shown on statement as” — with the name of my dentist’s office (where I actually was this morning).
Not the first time that some bit of automation on Apple’s or Goldman Sach’s side has misidentified a transaction. The other one I recall claimed (every month for a long time) that my Centurylink payment was actually from the US Navy or Marines, and showed me the location, which was an old (and closed) recruitment office.
Previously:
Update (2023-06-02): Juli Clover:
Apple Card customers who have opted to create a high-yield Apple Savings account through Goldman Sachs have been experiencing issues attempting to withdraw their money, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
Multiple customers who transferred thousands of dollars to the Apple Savings account have had to wait weeks for money transfers in some cases, and some customers have also had money disappear.
Update (2023-08-09): Greg Pierce:
I like the idea of ease of use, but the interest rate isn’t keeping up with what I get elsewhere. They are at 4.15% and I’m currently getting 4.75% at Betterment. 🤷♂️
VIO is now a full point higher at 5.15%, and the others I mentioned have increased, too. All are now the same or higher than Apple.
I recently opened a "high yield" savings account on etrade where I had to spend literal days to link to an external account just to move money in. Maneuvering the website is nonintuitive and I was never really certain where my money was at any given time. The interest rate is over a full quarter point less than what apple is offering too.