Apple's Card Fiasco Suggests Old Money Still Rules Tech
A Costly Lesson in Humility
Well, well, well. It seems the titans of Silicon Valley have had a rather bruising encounter with the unglamorous reality of consumer finance. The news that JPMorgan Chase is swooping in to rescue the Apple Card from Goldman Sachs’s fumbling grasp is, to me, not just a business transaction. It’s a delicious, cautionary tale about what happens when dazzling tech ambition meets the grim, number-crunching world of lending.
For years, we’ve been told that Big Tech was coming to eat the banks’ lunch. Instead, it looks like Goldman Sachs, a veritable giant of Wall Street, choked on the very first course. The lesson here is wonderfully simple. Designing a sleek app and a minimalist titanium card is one thing. Running the sprawling, messy, and frankly quite boring infrastructure needed to service millions of ordinary people is another thing entirely.