Apple doesn’t want to be your banker anymore

Last year, reports emerged that Apple wanted to end its partnership with Goldman Sachs. The companies had joined forces to offer an Apple-branded credit card in 2019, followed by a high-yield savings account in 2023.

But growing losses may have prompted Goldman Sachs to rethink its partnership with the tech giant. In January 2023, the bank disclosed that it had lost $3 billion from its consumer-banking activities since 2020.

The Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, reported in November that Apple was looking to exit from its partnership with Goldman Sachs in the next 12 to 15 months.

It’s unclear whether Apple will replace Goldman Sachs with another financial-services partner, though the chances of that happening appear slim.

The banking giant Citigroup previously passed on the partnership over profitability concerns, CNBC reported in May 2019, citing people with knowledge of the bank’s negotiations with Apple.

Representatives for Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.

Disrupting businesses is a tough business

Apple’s travails in the financial-services sector underscore the immense challenges it can face when trying to disrupt an established industry.

The Cupertino giant previously had a stunning track record for disruption — whether it was in the music industry with the iPod and iTunes or when it reinvented the phone with the iPhone.

But Apple’s recent attempts at innovation haven’t hit the same bar.

For one, the company’s attempt at a mixed-reality headset, the Apple Vision Pro, was met with muted sales and middling reviews.

And if that wasn’t enough, Apple said in the same month that it was pulling the plug on its electric-car project after working on it for nearly a decade, Bloomberg reported.

In fact, Apple once dreamed of reinventing the television, with the company’s cofounder Steve Jobs saying he’d figured out how to do it.

“I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,” Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson. “It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.”

It’s been more than a decade since Jobs’ death, and Apple doesn’t seem anywhere close to realizing his vision, besides its set-top box, Apple TV, and its fledgling streaming service, Apple TV+.

To be sure, disruption is tough, even for a trillion-dollar tech behemoth such as Apple. But the company could increase its chances of success by sticking to what it knows best — making great consumer-facing technology.

While some may view Apple as a laggard in AI, the company has managed to charm the markets with its vision of practical and user-centric AI tools.

Now, a lot could still happen down the line, but offering a highly personalized and seamless AI service is right up Apple’s alley.

And for a company whose motto is “Think Different,” relying on its ethos instead of deep pockets may be the key to beating the competition.

Correction: June 18, 2024 — An earlier version of this story misstated the year Apple began offering a high-yield savings account with Goldman Sachs. It was 2023, not 2022.