PayPal's CEO responds to Apple's Venmo competitor: 'Apple can never do that'

For years, Apple has been developing a way to easily transfer money from one iPhone to another.

This fall, that feature will launch as part of the next version of iOS, the software that runs on iPhones. Once the feature launches, people with iPhones can send and request money from other iPhones with Apple Pay with a tap or two.

The new service has been called a "Venmo killer," referring to the PayPal-owned app that handled nearly $6.8 billion in transactions during the first quarter of 2017.

If Apple's feature takes off, some argue, it could bite into the amount of transactions Venmo handles.

The CEO of PayPal doesn't see it that way. In fact, he said he wasn't particularly worried by Apple in an interview with the Telegraph published on Monday.

"We own the full value proposition. Apple can never do that because they don't do the risk associated with it, they don't do the onboarding, they can only provide what they hope is a good user interface. We try to provide that end-to-end value proposition and very importantly we do it across operating systems," PayPal CEO Dan Schulman told the Independent.

In this short comment, Schulman is highlighting several reasons why Venmo or PayPal may be more fully featured than Apple's payments services.

For example, PayPal handles backend and fraud risks of payments on its platform, and while Apple has yet to fully detail how its Apple Pay payments platform will work, it wouldn't be surprising if Apple would rather have the backend risk handled by financial institutions.

Venmo also has a social feed where you can see your friends' payments, which iMessage doesn't have.

Venmo also works across Android - so if you're splitting a check several ways after a dinner, users don't have to check to see if everyone owns an iPhone. Apple's payments platform will only work on iPhones, iPads, and other Apple products when it launches this fall.