Follow the money: Apple vs. the FBI
The logic in this article seems confused to me.<p>The central business problem for retail banks is how to earn more from deposits than they pay in interest, and to do so at a scale of billions of dollars.  Apple also needs to figure out how to make money from its pile of cash.  Accepting deposits and becoming a bank would only make that problem worse - so how is "having lots of cash" evidence that Apple wants to be a bank?<p>An investment bank is a different animal and I would strongly disagree with the author that Apple is a "de facto investment bank".  Investment banks advise clients on financial transactions and help clients hedge risk (something Apple doesn't do).<p>There are much more straightforward and compelling explanations for why Apple cares about security (as others in this thread have pointed out).<p>The only thing I would slightly agree with is that Apple maybe has an eye toward building its own payments network (a payments network is NOT a bank, by the way).  But Apple isn't even CLOSE to competing with Visa and MasterCard in that regard - even if it did disintermediate the credit card companies it would have to have much much larger consumer adoption of Apple Pay plus a merchant network.<p>Honestly the tone and muddled structure of this article come off as a poorly substantiated conspiracy theory.