A multiyear plan would help the computing giant develop its own infrastructure for financial products. It would facilitate new approaches to payment processing, risk assessment for lending, fraud analysis, credit checks, and more.

Why should we care?
Following Meta’s stablecoin failure and Alphabet’s scrapped plans for bank accounts, Apple’s decision to double down on financial products may seem misinformed. But Apple’s payment services are already quite robust; Apple Pay, though not in the same league as Visa or Mastercard, has become an established part of Apple’s services ecosystem. Joining a hardware-forward network, Apple-branded financial services would help increase user engagement, boosting income from transactions and interest. And in-house infrastructure would let Apple offer its services abroad. At present, its Apple Card and Cash Card are only available in the U.S. because of limitations set by partners like CoreCard and Green Dot. Unsurprisingly, then, the project has been dubbed “Breakout” in internal Apple comms—not only breaking away from the existing limitations of our financial system, but also scaling Apple’s financial services beyond U.S. borders.