PayPal (PYPL) Stock Closes Lower on New Apple Payments Service Speculation

Potential partners at the negotiating table are said to include J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Capital One Financial Corp., Wells Fargo & Co. and U.S. Bancorp. Should the plan move forward, the WSJ reports that Apple’s service could roll out as early as 2016.

WSJ’s sources say the service being considered “would allow consumers to zap payments from their checking accounts to recipients through their Apple devices” and “would likely be linked to the company’s Apple Pay system, which allows customers to make credit-card and debit-card payments with their mobile phones”. There are still technical details that need to be worked out, such as how Apple’s service would fit into existing banking infrastructure.

Shares of PayPal – which runs a similar P2P payment service called Venmo – sunk 2.6% in afternoon trading, while Apple shares stayed flat at $116.50. The service would be a direct competitor to Venmo, along with Google’s revamped Google Wallet service.

The feature would be baked into Apple Pay, the mobile payments platform in the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch that allows people to quickly pay for things in stores and apps that support the technology.

Meanwhile, Apple is yet to finalize exactly how it would handle the technological side of such a service.

The service, if it does launch, would immediately inject hype into the nascent person-to-person mobile payments market.