Apple launched Apple Pay only last week, and already it is coming under direct fire from rival company PayPal.
Apple could not have launched Apple Pay at a worse time given the iCloud hack that led to nude celebrity photos being leaked online.
That event is PayPal's latest marketing ammunition, with the slogan of the campaign being "we the people want our money safer than our selfies."
PayPal has even gone as far as to take out a full page in the New York Times to advertise its take on Apple Pay and while it doesn't mention Apple specifically, it's not hard to make the connection.
Apple has publicly stated that iCloud did not suffer a data breach and that hackers instead used social engineering techniques to obtain the photos.
According to PayPal, if Apple can't be trusted with simple things like pictures then it surely can't be trusted with money.
The swing at Apple isn't completely unfounded, at least from PayPal's point of view. When Apple announced Apple Pay on Sept. 9, shares of eBay, PayPal's parent company, dropped 3 percent. PayPal definitely has reason to be worried.
Apple Pay will likely be the default payment option for iPhone users, allowing Apple to muscle its way to the top of the small but growing online payment market. A similar thing happened when Microsoft made Internet Explorer the default browser on all Windows computers. The move catapulted IE to the top of the list of browsers.
However, Apple Pay may or may not be strong enough to take out PayPal. In many ways, PayPal has been synonymous with online payments for years.
Not only will Apple Pay be the default on the iPhone 6, but Apple is also reportedly restricting use of the NFC chip on the iPhone 6 to Apple Pay, meaning users won't be able to take advantage of the addition of the technology to use PayPal instead.
Apple has also given PayPal the cold shoulder, not listing it as a "favored" payment system, but listing competitors such as Stripe instead. Despite this, PayPal has said that its app will be capable of handling Apple Pay payments.
While PayPal's point is pertinent, it's also a little misleading. Apple Pay, of course, does not intersect in any way with iCloud other than that it's a system offered by Apple. In fact, Apple Pay is being hailed as one of the safer payment options, far safer than credit cards, for example. Apple Pay essentially uses a tokenization system that does not store credit card numbers or any data, minimizing vulnerabilities within the system.
