Mad Mad News

LIVE ABOVE THE MADNESS

SUCCESS


You Can’t Use Apple Pay on Amazon: Here’s the Real Reason Why

Filed Under: Money.com, SUCCESS

Many of the country’s largest retailers and marketplaces — brands like Target, Home Depot and eBay — now accept Apple Pay wherever you check out.
Amazon, the biggest online retailer in the U.S., is a key exception.

Must Read

You’re probably eligible to save money on car insurance. Compare rates for your ZIP code with this free — and fast — tool from Money.
Meet your financial goals faster: Take this free, no-obligation quiz to get matched with an advisor today.
These 6 hacks can help seniors save money on things they’re already buying.

Amazon has never publicly commented on why it doesn’t accept Apple Pay, and neither has Apple, which did not respond to Money’s inquiries. But with Walmart finally breaking, announcing in August that it would accept Apple Pay after years of customer demands, shoppers are wondering whether Amazon could be next.
The stats around Apple Pay’s penetration are impressive — but perhaps unsurprising for Apple, which ships more than half of U.S. smartphones. Apple says its payment service is now accepted at over 85% of U.S. retailers, giving its users millions of places to shop even without a wallet. Double-press the side button, tap, pay, go.
Walmart now accepts Apple Pay. What about Amazon?
Recognizing that digital wallets are gaining popularity, Walmart is adding tap-to-pay in all its stores by the end of 2026. Shoppers have rejoiced in online forums (and, in at least one instance, at a night club).
However, it’s notable that Walmart has not added Apple Pay as a payment option online. The change applies to the company’s 4,600 stores, not Walmart.com.
Amazon declined to comment on Money’s questions for this story but did confirm that Whole Foods, which it has owned since 2017, accepts Apple Pay in its 540 brick-and-mortar locations in the U.S. In this respect, Amazon and Walmart are now on similar footing: Both accept Apple Pay in stores, but not online.
Eric Cohen, founder and CEO at Merchant Advocate, predicts that Amazon will continue holding out. Regular Amazon shoppers, including Prime members, generally have a card number on file, and the Amazon Buy Now button already makes payment easy.
“Amazon has their one-click. It’s frictionless,” he says. (It’s also one of the most famous patents in software history.)
Where Apple Pay could make a difference for Amazon is in attracting new customers, Cohen says. With Apple Pay, you don’t have to get out your wallet, find your credit card, type a 16-digit card number and complete the fields on a tiny mobile device. The experience would be seamless for new Amazon customers shopping on an iPhone.
Amazon has over 200 million paying members in the U.S.; Apple Pay is used by hundreds of millions globally. These are the kinds of numbers Cohen says Amazon is likely crunching behind the scenes.
What Amazon would lose by accepting Apple Pay
Amazon’s reticence to accept Apple Pay likely has little to do with cost — Apple doesn’t charge merchants a special fee to accept Apple Pay in stores or online.
“It’s about control of data,” Cohen says.
By accepting Apple Pay, retailers give up a whole lot of valuable information: a customer’s actual payment card number and associated data. Apple Pay masks this information for security.
Instead of seeing an actual card number, Amazon would see a tokenized number for those transactions, which could create several issues for the company. Card data helps Amazon build its risk models, which indicate the likelihood of fraud and chargebacks, says Aaron McPherson, principal and founder of AFM Consulting.
Because these are expensive problems to solve, Amazon has a vested interest in preventing them — hence its desire to hang on to customers’ card data.
Also, on debit card transactions, companies like Amazon benefit from a legal requirement that debit transactions must give retailers a choice from at least two unaffiliated networks for routing, helping them save on fees, McPherson says. Amazon could lose that ability with Apple Pay.
Is the Big Tech rivalry to blame?
The long history of competition between Amazon and Apple likely factors into why you can’t use Apple Pay on Amazon.
“When you’re talking about these giants, there’s got to be a little bit of this… ego,” Cohen adds. “They’re like friendly enemies, but I think it would be really hard for Amazon to go, ‘OK, let’s put that Apple logo on.’”
As two of the world’s most valuable companies, they inevitably compete in many areas. Earlier this month, for example, Apple unveiled its HomeView smart home hub, powered by Siri, which will challenge Amazon’s Echo lineup, powered by Alexa.
The two firms have also clashed over payments for more than 15 years. In 2010, then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs and other executives were internally discussing how to respond to an Amazon commercial promoting Kindle. Phil Schiller, then Apple’s senior vice president, wrote in an email that the ad shows a customer using an iPhone to purchase books with the Kindle app.
“The woman then switches to an Android phone and still can read all her books,” Schiller added. “Not fun to watch.”
In response, Jobs suggested that “the first step might be to say they must use our payment system for everything, including books… let’s force them to use our far superior payment system,” he wrote.
The emails first surfaced in 2013 as part of the U.S. Department of Justice’s 2012 e-book case against Apple. More recently, the emails became the opening example in the department’s 2024 “smartphone monopoly” antitrust complaint against Apple.
The year after the ad, Apple started requiring a 30% cut from Amazon and other retailers on in-app e-book purchases, prompting Amazon to turn off the purchase feature in the app.
The dust still hasn’t settled.
“They [Amazon] definitely see Apple as a big rival, and so I think it’s unlikely that they would do anything to help Apple out,” McPherson says.
Amazon Pay vs. Apple Pay
The 2024 DOJ case is ongoing, and Apple is reportedly in settlement talks. The case involves allegations that Apple has kept its No. 1 spot, in part, by blocking other digital wallets from using its near field communication (NFC) chip for tap-to-pay.
“While Apple actively encourages banks, merchants and other parties to participate in Apple Wallet, Apple simultaneously exerts its smartphone monopoly to block these same partners from developing better payment products and services for iPhone users,” the complaint read.
Google Pay is Apple Pay’s most direct parallel, functioning as the Apple Pay for Android users. But Amazon has its own wallet, too: Amazon Pay.
Amazon’s goals for Amazon Pay are part of the reason you likely won’t see Apple Pay on Amazon anytime soon, according to Tony DeSanctis, vice president at Cornerstone Advisors. Amazon Pay not only powers payments on Amazon.com — it’s also accepted at thousands of non-Amazon retailers, including Grubhub, Casper and Fashion Nova.
“They’re trying to generate revenue off of that by bringing smaller merchants into their ecosystem, and so they’re actually doing exactly what Apple’s doing,” DeSanctis says. “They’re not going to embolden their own competitor, Apple Pay, by giving them all of that Amazon volume.”
For everyday shoppers, the benefit of both services is convenience. Third-party merchants that add the Amazon Pay button to their checkout processes enable shoppers to use payment info already stored in their Amazon account.
In a January 2024 comment to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Amazon said that digital wallets “are additive, not limiting, in terms of consumer options” and “often promote consumer safety.”
An Amazon spokesperson did not answer Money’s question as to whether it sees Apple Pay the same way.

Never miss a Money story.

Join 700,000+ readers who get the latest financial news and advice delivered daily for free. Subscribe to our newsletters.

SoFi surge catches short sellers flat-footed after record 1.2 million member quarter

Filed Under: SUCCESS, The Street

Digital financial services provider SoFi Technologies (SOFI) has been under fire from short sellers who believe it won’t be able to win business away from embedded-bank rivals, including Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

As of the end of September, short sellers held 214.9 million SoFi shares short, representing 16.9% of shares outstanding, and up from 177.5 million shares at the end of August.

However, the company’s third-quarter results, including the addition of a record 1.2 million members, and better-than-expected guidance for 2027, suggest SoFi is making more progress than short sellers expected.

SoFi third quarter shows progress as it expands services

SoFi began as a student loan specialist, but over the years, CEO Anthony Noto has transformed the company into more of a traditional bank, allowing it to grow deposits that provide cheap financing for personal and home loans.

“In less than a decade, we have transformed SoFi from a single-product company into an everything financial app with eight different businesses each generating over $100 million in annualized revenue,” said Noto about the company’s third-quarter performance.

Total membership rose 35% year over year to 17.1 million, fueling record revenue of $1.385 billion, up 44% from one year ago. Net income rose 73% to $241 million. Its net interest margin, the spread between lending rates and the cost of funding them, expanded 16 basis points to 6.14%.

SoFi reported earnings of 18 cents per share, above Wall Street’s 17 cents estimate.

The growth was driven by more members and greater demand for services, including financial services products such as SoFi Money, Relay, and Invest, which accounted for 88% of the quarter’s product growth.

Lending demand was also solid, rising 39% to 3.4 million products across personal, student, and home loans.

SoFi’s stock price surged after the third-quarter financials caught short sellers off guard.Sportico / Getty Images

Guidance sparks short squeeze in SoFi stock as company is ‘cooking with gas’

Based on average trading volume, it would take 4.8 days to cover all the shares held short in SoFi at the end of September.

It seems some of those bearish bets are flipping following the third-quarter results, given SoFi’s stock price jumped 14.6% at 12:16 pm EDT on 112.4 million shares, well above the stock’s normal average trading volume of 49.4 million shares.

Stephen Guilfoyle is a long-term trader whose career stretches back to 1987 on the New York Stock Exchange. He’s a fan of CEO Noto’s push to expand SoFi into more products, and says the most recent performance shows SoFi is executing.

“The financial services firm appears to be cooking with gas,” wrote Guilfoyle on TheStreet Pro. “Corporate execution has been excellent. The growth is outstanding.”

Guilfoyle picked SoFi earlier this year as his ‘stock of the year’ for 2026, and up until now, he’s been wrong, given shares came into the earnings report down 45% this year.

“I have been behind this stock for quite a while and caught a few snickers when I made it my ‘stock of the year’ for 2026,” said Guilfoyle. “My timing was obviously wrong regarding the stock-of-the-year selection.”

Still, Guilfoyle remains a fan of SoFi stock, and the company’s guidance and outlook leave him optimistic that a corner has been turned for shareholders.

“The quarter was excellent. The lending segment absolutely ripped the cover off the ball. Guidance is far better than a rational man could have hoped for,” said Guilfoyle.

SoFi is targeting adjusted revenue of $5.04 billion this year, up 40% year over year. Next year, it expects revenue to climb 27% to $6.4 billion. On the bottom line, guidance is for 61 cents in 2026 and 90 cents in 2027, outpacing analysts’ 59 and 82 cents estimates.

Guilfoyle’s SoFi stock price target is $24.

Todd Campbell owns shares in SoFi Technologies at the time of this writing.

More Stocks NewsAI chips are getting so hot, diamonds may be the answerPepsi vs. Coca-Cola: Which Dividend King stock will outperform in 2027?Warren Buffett sends timeless advice to S&P 500 stock investorsPalantir is one of just 3 crushed S&P 500 stocks up for the year

A ‘Comfortable Retirement’ Isn’t Just a Number. It’s These 5 Monthly Bills

Filed Under: Money.com, SUCCESS

A comfortable retirement doesn’t necessarily just come down to how much money you have saved up. Your lifestyle plays a major factor.
A $1 million nest egg is enough for some people, while others aim to save closer to $5 million. Living a comfortable retirement comes down to your ability to reliably cover monthly bills with Social Security, portfolio withdrawals and other income sources. Considering these monthly bills can help.

Must Read

You’re probably eligible to save money on car insurance. Compare rates for your ZIP code with this free — and fast — tool from Money.
Meet your financial goals faster: Take this free, no-obligation quiz to get matched with an advisor today.
These 6 hacks can help seniors save money on things they’re already buying.

The bills you can’t skip: housing and health care
Mapping out how much you need for a comfortable retirement starts with your biggest, unskippable bills. Homeownership still has costs even after you have paid off the mortgage, including property taxes, homeowners insurance, utilities and applicable homeowners association (HOA) fees. You also have to be prepared for repairs and maintenance costs.
Writing down all of your housing expenses can help you determine how much money you need. It can also inspire you to seek alternatives to your current lifestyle, such as downsizing, relocating or selling your home and renting. Lowering your expenses makes it easier to live a comfortable retirement, especially if you focus on housing costs.
Regardless of where you live, health care costs will also add up. While Medicare offers some coverage, you will have to factor in premiums, prescriptions, dental, vision and other costs. A Fidelity report estimates that a 65-year-old who retired last year can end up spending $172,500 on health care and medical expenses throughout retirement.
Everyday costs: food and transportation
The next two bills address everyday costs. All food-related purchases, including groceries, dining out and delivery, count as one category. Your habits — such as if you cook or dine out — and location influence how much you spend on food.
Transportation is another essential cost that includes car payments, insurance, gas, maintenance, rideshares, public transit and other methods of travel. You may only need one car instead of two if you and your spouse are both retired.
Debt, taxes and insurance obligations
Debt, taxes, and insurance obligations can take up a large portion of your budget. Factoring these into your financial planning can prevent unpleasant surprises and ensure a comfortable retirement instead of a rude awakening.
Any credit card debt, loans, mortgages and other debt will compete with basic living costs. It’s optimal to pay off this debt as quickly as possible — even if that means picking up a part-time job or cutting back significantly on spending. While Social Security can help, don’t forget that it’s eligible for taxation. Pension income and withdrawals from traditional retirement plans are also taxable.
Long-term care is a cost that’s often forgotten, especially early in retirement. But it can become a large line item down the road. Getting a long-term care insurance policy can reduce your costs if you end up needing long-term care, but you will have monthly premiums chipping away at your budget.

Never miss a Money story.

Join 700,000+ readers who get the latest financial news and advice delivered daily for free. Subscribe to our newsletters.

How Human-Centered Technology Design Is Changing the Way People Store, Access, and Manage Digital Information

Filed Under: Addicted2Success, SUCCESS

Not long ago, keeping track of digital files felt like a chore reserved for people who understood computers well. Today, technology is increasingly shaped around the way people actually think, work, and live. Human-centered design puts the user first, asking what feels natural, what saves time, and what removes stress. That shift is quietly changing how everyday people hold on to their files, reach them when needed, and keep them neatly organized across phones, laptops, and the cloud.
What Sits Inside Our Devices Matters More Than It Seems
Most people judge a device by its screen, its camera, or its price, yet the parts hidden inside shape the daily experience just as much. The way a device keeps information decides how quickly apps open, how smoothly files load, and how long the device stays useful. Two common options for device storage, built-in memory chips and solid-state drives, behave very differently, and choosing the wrong one can leave people with a device that feels slow or runs out of room far too soon. Understanding these options in plain terms helps buyers, designers, and businesses pick hardware that truly suits the people using it.
For a clear explanation, Lexar Enterprise compares 3 storage differences across performance, cost, scalability, and reliability and longevity. Knowing how these factors play out makes it far easier to match a device to the way it will be used every day.
Designing Around Real Human Habits
Human-centered design begins with observation. Designers watch how people use their devices, where they get stuck, and which tasks they repeat most often. Many people save files in a hurry, rarely sort them later, and expect to find them instantly when the moment comes. Instead of forcing users to adopt strict filing habits, modern systems adapt to these natural patterns. Search tools now recognize names, dates, places, and even objects inside photos. These small choices reflect a simple idea: technology should bend to fit people, not the other way around.
Making Information Easy to Reach From Anywhere
People no longer work from a single desk or a single device. A document might be started on a laptop at the office, reviewed on a phone during a commute, and finished on a tablet at home. Human-centered systems treat this movement as normal. Syncing tools keep the latest version available everywhere, so users do not have to email files to themselves or carry small drives in their pockets. When information follows the person rather than staying locked in one place, daily routines become smoother and less stressful.
Protecting Privacy and Building Trust
As people keep more of their lives in digital form, they also worry more about who can see their information. Photos, medical records, bank details, and personal messages all deserve careful protection. Human-centered design treats privacy as a basic need rather than an extra setting buried in a menu. Clear permission requests explain what an app wants to access and why. Simple controls let people lock sensitive folders, share files with only chosen contacts, and remove access later. When people understand and control what happens to their information, they trust their devices and use them with greater confidence.
Supporting People With Varied Abilities
Not every user sees, hears, or moves in the same way. Thoughtful design makes digital information usable for people with a wide range of abilities. Voice commands let users find files without typing. Larger text, high-contrast screens, and screen readers help people with limited vision. Simple gestures support those who find small buttons difficult to press. These features began as accessibility tools, yet many people now use them every day simply because they are convenient. Designing for varied needs often improves the experience for everyone, which is one of the strongest arguments for putting people at the center of technology.
How Businesses Benefit From People-First Technology
Companies see real value when their tools are built around the people who use them. Employees spend less time searching for files and more time doing meaningful work. Clear sharing tools make teamwork easier across departments and locations. Simple systems also reduce training time, since new staff can learn them quickly. When hardware and software suit the tasks people perform each day, devices last longer, support requests drop, and teams stay productive. For businesses, choosing technology with the user in mind is not only kind to employees but also a sound long-term decision.
Looking Ahead at People-Focused Innovation
The future of managing digital information will likely feel even more personal and intuitive. Smart assistants may soon organize files based on a person’s habits, predict which documents they will need for a meeting, and prepare them in advance. Devices will continue to grow faster, lighter, and more efficient while using less power. As these changes arrive, the guiding question will remain the same: does this make life easier for the person holding the device? When designers keep that question in focus, technology becomes a helpful partner that quietly supports the way people live and work.
The post How Human-Centered Technology Design Is Changing the Way People Store, Access, and Manage Digital Information appeared first on Addicted 2 Success.