The retail bank was a mess. It’s a stepping stone for Solomon to disrupt the trading culture and take control of the bank from the investment bank. It costs a lot to set up a retail bank, and the political will was there to start but not to finish. The politics around the retail bank was hyper toxic, with a classic us and them mentality. The established tech and back office were marginalized and the retail bank tried to build it all themselves but learned the hard way very late those groups exist for a reason - regulatory and security bars are super high and can’t be achieved by hubris alone. Apple had extremely aggressive asks of the technical stack, they outsourced a lot of core stuff to SaaS finserv at a high margin, and a bunch of other issues. Finally the timing of it all was awful. They started in a super low rates cash flush world and things have gotten harder everywhere for them.
But Apple could take it to an 11 too. If they finance your equipment and you fall behind on your payments, guess whose equipment just went into lock-out mode... Apple could then allow the device to be returned to an Apple Store, and credit will be applied to the account. A voluntary return policy, only throw in a carrot of if you provide a memory stick, they'll make you a copy of the data for a small nominal fee.
Ford, Chevy, Toyota, Honda, et al. repo cars daily, and their brands are not hurting. People know when they can't make payments that their collateral is likely to be collected.
I'm not saying I'm for them doing this or anything, but just taking the dystopian concept to a logical completion. We've already seen where self driving cars have been discussed repossessing themselves, so this is just the natural extension of the same concept. This forum tends to think that places like FB, Googs, etc should have a very negative brand due to the data collections, but the masses don't give a damn.
Those are typically finance companies, so dealers are no where near repossession. Each of the big auto makers all have their own financing companies, so it very much is the manufactures.
I believe that remotely disabling your car if you don't pay has been an established practice among "buy here pay here" dealers for many years. It's an "innovative" way to lend to people who have bad or no credit.
On the other hand, I've never heard of it spreading outside that market segment.
It would be news to me if the major manufacturers finance arms have the capability and are keeping it on the down low.
If Goldman is the one handling the lending, it is also the one sending you to collections.
The PR damage to Apple's brand can be significant