>> I am genuinely curious who can actually threaten Visa (I do not think it is Valve).

> Likely Apple currently has the deepest finance industry roots.

Apple used a very large bank headquartered in the US for its credit card processing as of about ten years ago. Given that the cost of change is significant once these processes are put in place, it is likely this remains the case.

Note that this is not the same as what Apple Pay supports.

If you consider the minutiae of percentage apple shaves off transactions with Apple Pay. Sure.

But they have partnered with GS and MC. Far from any sort of "finance industry roots".

They essentially offer a fancy UI on top of GS products and other traditional banks.

Apple Cash -> Green Dot or some other no name bank

Apple Card -> Goldman Sachs

Apple Pay -> some very small percentage of the bank and network fees charged to merchants

Honestly, with how prevalent iPhones and Androids are today, specially among newer humans, if Apple and Google made a payment system that just transferred money between iPhone/Android, it could practically replace cash & cards for a lot of people.

In some countries the vast majority of payments are done via phone apps for national payment systems already, bypassing Visa/Mastercard etc. entirely. Even kids pay for candy by phone.