Apple ditches Pay Later loan scheme

Apple has confirmed that it is ditching its Pay Later interest-free loan scheme mere months after its arrival.

Starting from June 17 (that’s yesterday), Apple has confirmed that it will no longer offer its Pay Later loan service to customers. This comes in the wake of last week’s WWDC event, at which Apple announced an addition to its Apple Pay service that would enable users to access “installment loan offerings from eligible credit or debit cards”.

At the time, that latter announcement sounded suspiciously like Apple was ditching Pay Later in favour of outsourcing the provision to third party financial organisations. Now Apple has confirmed that this is indeed the case in a statement supplied to 9to5Mac.

In the statement, Apple mentions that this loan service will “bring flexible payments to more users, in more places across the globe”. This would represent a major advance over Pay Later, which never got out of the US.

The tech giant launched its Apple Pay Later scheme for local users in October, allowing them to take out relatively smaller interest-free loans that were payable in four payments over six weeks.

Following its announcement at WWDC 2022, the Apple Pay Later service appeared to suffer from numerous technical issues at the testing phase, missing its intended iOS 16 launch.

While Apple will no longer be offering any new loans through Pay Later, existing service users will be able to continue to manage their loans through the Wallet app.