Fall is around the corner and prepaid card issuer Green Dot, which is the regulated bank partner for Apple Pay, has updates on Apple’s P2P money transfer service that will launch in the coming months.
In their earnings call for the second quarter ended in June 30, Green Dot CEO Steven Streit updated investors on developments on this partnership. He also warned investors not expect to see any material impact Green Dot’s financials for the rest of the year as a result of that partnership.
Here are the updates from Streit on yesterday’s earnings call:
Green Dot will serve in the role of merchants of record that accepts credit and debit card using Apple Pay to fund person to person money sending transactions. Then when users receive money in Apple Pay Cash, their money is securely kept in a Green Dot bank issued Apple Pay Cash account that is then available for the recipient to spend with Apple Pay in stores, in apps and on the web, or they can send it to someone else, or transfer to their bank account.
At a high-level, the business model is that, as the issuing bank for the Apple Pay cash account, Green Dot generates interchange revenue when customers use Apple Pay cash to spend the fund.
On the expense side, we’ll have the merchant processing expenses to accept the Apple Pays, where the merchants on the funding side of the transaction, plus the typical program management expenses we generally incur on any of our private label program. In any event, we do not expect the program to have a material impact on our financial performance for the remainder of this year.
As for their earnings, the prepaid card issuer saw another strong quarter. For the second quarter ended in June 30, 2017, Green Dot reported a 28% increase in total operational revenues to $222.5 million compared to $173.5 million in the same quarter last year. The company’s GAAP net income saw a large spike to $19.3 million from $8 million in the corresponding quarter in 2016. Green Dot, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol GDOT, has a market capitalization of $1.97 billion as of Wednesday, August 9.
Back in June, Apple announced at its Worldwide Developer Conference, that it would launch a money transfer app in the U.S. that will allow iPhone and iPad users to transfer money to each other through imessage. Watch out Venmo and Square Cash!