Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Your customers don’t really want to cancel. At least, not all of them. Between 15 and 30 percent of customers leave for reasons that are within your control. Tapping into these customers at the right moment for the right reason, and giving them a path to stay is the key to reducing churn for subscription companies. 

These six steps outline how to intercept customers who show intent to cancel, and use their feedback to take action, build better experiences and ultimately retain subscribers:

1. Survey every customer at the point of cancel
2. Define a reason-based classification system for churn
3. Connect churn data to a central source of truth
4. Segment customers by actionability
5. Deliver personalized, reason-based offers
6. Test and evolve using saved revenue as your KPI

Step 1. Survey every customer at the point of cancel 

The subscription industry has many ways of collecting customer feedback. Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and in-product surveys are table stakes for most companies. You need a regular pulse on customer sentiment, but polling customers while they’re still customers isn’t enough.

Cancellation is a critical moment in the customer lifecycle rivaled only by the moment of purchase, and yet it remains a blind spot for most companies.

When customers cancel, they’re sending a message with their wallets—to effectively reduce churn, you need to know why. Surveying customers at the point of cancel is an untapped opportunity because:

Self-driving startup Optimus Ride will become the first to operate a commercial self-driving service in the state of New York – in Brooklyn. But don’t expect these things to be contending with pedestrians, bike riders, taxis and cars on New York’s busiest roads; instead, they’ll be offering shuttle services within Brooklyn Navy Yards, a 300-acre private commercial development.

The Optimus Ride autonomous vehicles, which have six seats across three rows for passengers, and which also always have both a safety driver and another Optimus staff observer on board, at least for now, will offer service seven days a week, for free, running a service loop that will cover the entire complex. It includes a stop at a new ferry landing on-site, which means a lot of commuters should be able to pretty easily grab a seat in one for their last-mile needs.

Optimus Ride’s shuttles have been in operation in a number of different sites across the U.S., including in Boston, Virginia, California and Massachusetts.

The Brooklyn Navy Yards is a perfect environment for the service, since it plays host to some 10,000 workers, but also includes entirely private roads – which means Optimus Ride doesn’t need to worry about public road rules and regulations in deploying a commercial self-driving service.

May Mobility, an Ann Arbor-based startup also focused on low-speed autonomous shuttles, has deployed in partnership with some smaller cities and on defined bus route paths. The approach of both companies is similar, using relatively simple vehicle designs and serving low-volume ridership in areas where traffic and pedestrian patterns are relatively easy to anticipate.

Commercially viable, fully autonomous robotaxi service for dense urban areas is still a long, long way off – and definitely out of reach for startup and smaller companies in the near-term. Tackling commercial service in controlled environments on a smaller scale is a great way to build the business while bringing in revenue and offering actual value to paying customers at the same time.

DeepCode, a Swiss startup that’s using machine learning to automate code reviews, has closed a $4M seed round, led by European VC firm Earlybird, with participation from 3VC and existing investor btov Partners.

The founders described the platform as a sort of ‘Grammarly for coders’ when we chatted to them early last year. At the they were bootstapping. Now they’ve bagged their first venture capital to dial their efforts up.

DeepCode, which is spun-out of Swiss technical university ETH Zurich, says its code review AI is different because it doesn’t just pick up syntax mistakes but is able to determine the intent of the code because it processes millions of commits — giving it an overview that allows it to identify many more critical bugs and vulnerabilities than other tools.

“All of the static analysis and lint tools out there (there are hundreds of those) are providing similar code analysis services but without the deeper understanding of code, and mostly focusing on one language or specific languages,” says CEO and co-founder, Boris Paskalev, going on to name-check the likes of CA Technologies, Micro Focus (Fortify), Cast Software, and SonarSource as the main competitors DeepCode is targeting.

Its bot is free for enterprise teams of up to 30 developers, for open source software, and for educational use.

To use it developers connect DeepCode with their GitHub or Bitbucket accounts, with no configuration required. The bot will then immediately start reviewing each commit — picking up issues “in seconds”.  (You can see a demo of the code review tool here.)

“We do not disclose developer information but the number of Open Source Repositories that are using DeepCode have hundreds of thousands of total contributors,” Paskalev tells us when asked how many developers are using the tool now.

“We do not count rules per se as our AI Platform combines thousands of programming concepts, which if combined in individual rules will result in millions of separate rules,” he adds.

The seed funding will go on supporting additional integrations and more programming languages than the three currently supported (namely: Java, JavaScript, and Python); on improving the scope of code recommendations, and on expanding the team internationally.

Commenting in a statement, Christian Nagel, partner and co-founder of Earlybird, said: “For all industries and almost every business model, the performance and quality of coding has become key. DeepCode provides a platform that enhances the development capabilities of programmers. The team has a deep scientific understanding of code optimization and uses artificial intelligence to deliver the next breakthrough in software development.”

TickPick was founded back in 2011, but it never raised any institutional funding — until now, with the announcement of a $40 million investment from PWP Growth Equity.

Brett Goldberg and Chris O’Brien (who were college roommates before founding TickPick together and serving as co-CEOs) said they created the site as a marketplace where users could bid for tickets. However, O’Brien admitted that this functionality — while still supported — has “fallen by the wayside quite a bit,” and that the core of TickPick’s identity is now the elimination all hidden fees.

To be clear, the service still makes its money from fees, but those fees are all incorporated into the price you see up front, rather than appearing as an unpleasant surprise right before you make your purchase.

Goldberg said that while other ticket marketplaces have tried to do something similar, they inevitably go back to the old model, largely because they’re trying to compete on price and “everyone’s assuming there will be fees tacked on at the end.” In his view, TickPick has been able to hold out because “it’s just so core to our brand and messaging” – and when the company has strayed from that vision (like when it included a $5 e-delivery fee), customers were quick to complain.

TickPick started out as a secondary marketplace for ticket resellers, but it’s started to sell tickets directly from partners like Firefly Music Festival and Riot Fest, the Big South and Western Athletic Conferences, Florida International, Georgia State and Santa Clara Universities, Ric Flair, Sports Illustrated Saturday Night Lights, Shaq’s Fun House and the Maxim Pregame Experience.

The company says it’s on-track to facilitate $200 million worth of transactions in 2019, up 60% year-over-year.

Asked why TickPick didn’t raise outside funding before this, Goldberg said it didn’t have the traction to win over investors, unless the team was willing to “sell a large stake in the business for not that much money.”

O’Brien added, “We always seem to find ourselves in a weird position in the broader ecosystem of startups, because of our focus on profitability — it’s not the same story as a lot of other startups.”

Now, however, Goldberg suggested that “the bootstrap model” might finally be holding the company back from reaching the next level. tTe pair plans to use the new funding to make some key hires like a chief financial officer and a chief marketing officer, and to build a data team that can help TickPick use artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve the customer experience.

“We seek to partner with passionate and committed management teams with differentiated business models looking to further unlock their growth potential – and we found that in abundance in TickPick,” said PWP Managing Partner John McKee in a statement. “Since its founding, TickPick has been disrupting the secondary event ticketing industry with its unique value proposition and established an incredibly loyal, passionate customer base.”

Cockroach Labs, makers of CockroachDB, sits in a tough position in the database market. On one side, it has traditional database vendors like Oracle, and on the other there’s AWS and its family of databases. It takes some good technology and serious dollars to compete with those companies. Cockroach took care of the latter with a $55 million Series C round today.

The round was led by Altimeter Capital and Tiger Global along with existing investor GV. Other existing investors including Benchmark, Index Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, FirstMark Capital and Work-Bench also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to over $110 million, according to the company.

Spencer Kimball, co-founder and CEO, says the company is building a modern database to compete with these industry giants. “CockroachDB is architected from the ground up as a cloud native database. Fundamentally, what that means is that it’s distributed, not just across nodes in a single data center, which is really table stakes as the database gets bigger, but also across data centers to be resilient. It’s also distributed potentially across the planet in order to give a global customer base what feels like a local experience to keep the data near them,” Kimball explained.

At the same time, even while it has a cloud product hosted on AWS, it also competes with several AWS database products including Amazon Aurora, Redshift and DynamoDB. Much like MongoDB, which changed its open source licensing structure last year, Cockroach did as well, for many of the same reasons. They both believed bigger players were taking advantage of the open source nature of their products to undermine their markets.

“If you’re trying to build a business around an open source product, you have to be careful that a much bigger player doesn’t come along and extract too much of the value out of the open source product that you’ve been building and maintaining,” Kimball explained.

As the company deals with all of these competitive pressures, it takes a fair bit of money to continue building a piece of technology to beat the competition, while going up against much deeper-pocketed rivals. So far the company has been doing well with Q1 revenue this year doubling all of last year. Kimball indicated that Q2 could double Q1, but he wants to keep that going, and that takes money.

“We need to accelerate that sales momentum and that’s usually what the Series C is about. Fundamentally, we have, I think, the most advanced capabilities in the market right now. Certainly we do if you look at the differentiator around just global capability. We nevertheless are competing with Oracle on one side, and Amazon on the other side. So a lot of this money is going towards product development too,” he said.

Cockroach Labs was founded in 2015, and is based in New York City.

India’s e-commerce giant Flipkart said on Tuesday that it is revamping its shopping app to add support for Hindi language, a video streaming service, and an audio-visual assistant, the latest in a series of recent efforts to expand its reach in the country.

The Walmart-owned company, which leads the local market, told TechCrunch that it has started to rollout the features on its shopping app and will push it to all its existing users in within next 20 days.

Only 10% of India’s 1.3 billion people speak English. Flipkart said it has been working to customize its entire platform for several months to add support for Hindi. As part of the revamp, the company is also introducing an “audio visual guided navigation” feature, also built in Hindi, that is aimed at first time internet users — and existing online users not comfortable with making transactions online — to make it easier for them to navigate the site and place orders.

As part of the accessibility push, Flipkart is also introducing an in-app video streaming feature dubbed ‘Flipkart Videos,’ that will syndicate movies, shows, and other long-form and short form content from a number of production houses and movie studios, the company said.

Its rival Amazon India added support for Hindi last year, though the feature is limited to basic text translation.

The inclusion of video streaming feature comes as Indians’ appetite for consuming media content on the internet has ballooned in the recent years. Hotstar, a Disney-owned video streaming service, has amassed more than 300 million monthly active users in the country.

Flipkart said the video streaming feature will enable it to invite a new segment of users to its platform who are online but don’t currently shop on the internet. Even as more than 500 million users are connected to the web in India, only tens of millions of them currently shop there. The streaming feature will be accessible to all users at no charge without any loyalty program, a company spokesperson said, refuting a recent media report that claimed the feature will be limited to loyalty customers.

“In the past 10 years our vision and ethos have been to solve for ‘Real India,’ create India specific tech solutions, here in India. What we are rolling out when it comes to addressing the needs of the next 200 million users in our country, is taking forward those founding principles of access and affordability,” said Kalyan Krishnamurthy, Group CEO of Flipkart, in a statement.

“We strongly believe that the next phase of our growth is rooted in loyalty , democratizing e-commerce and the country will continue seeing more innovations that stem from our deep understanding of Indian consumers, especially middle India.”

Flipkart said it is also attempting to make it easier for users to discover items on its app. So it is introducing a feed called ‘Flipkart Ideas’ that will populate short form videos, animated images, polls and quizzes.

For instance, a user may see a short form video that shows a sportsperson wearing a pair of sneakers, a t-shirt, a pair of jeans, and a cap. If they tap on the video, they will see the exact items the person in the video is wearing and other similar items. One more tap, and the user would be able to purchase any of those items.

The company said it is working with more than 400 influencers and 30 brands to create content that will appear on the feed.

All of these features, as well as a gaming section that Flipkart introduced last year, will now appear at the bottom of the screen for easier navigation, the company said. More than half a million users in India play mini-games on Flipkart everyday. The company said it will introduce more games to boost engagement levels and offer loyalty points as incentive to customers.

Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, is looking to add some cash to its coffers via a new proposed private offering of $1 billion in convertible senior notes, with a due date for maturation of August 1, 2026. The debt offering will be used to cover the cost of general operating expenditures involved in running the business, Snap says, but also potentially to “acquire complementary businesses, products, services or technologies,” as well as possibly for future stock repurchase plans, though no such plans exist currently.

Raising debt to fund operations and acquisitions is not unusual for a publicly traded company – Netflix does this regularly to pick up more money to fund its increasingly expensive production budget for content, for instance. So far, the market seems to be reacting negatively to the news of Snap’s decision to seek this chunk of debt funding, however, as it’s down in pre-market trading.

Snap has generally been on a positive path in terms of its relationship with stockholders, however – its stock price rose on the back of a strong quarterly earnings report at the end of July, closing above its IPO price for the first time. It’s now dipped south of that mark again, but it’s still much-improved on a year-to-date timeline measure.

SpaceX is launching a Falcon 9 rocket with a huge communications satellite as payload, with launch window opening at 6:53 PM EDT (3:53 PM PDT) today. The window extends to 8:21 PM EDT, so there’s a possibility of a launch anytime in between there, should weather conditions or anything impact the ability to launch. The livestream above should begin around 15 minutes prior to the opening of the launch window.

The launch will use a twice-flown Falcon 9 first stage booster, which previously flew in missions in July and November of last year. This will be the last mission for the rocket, however, since the launch is configured in ‘expendable’ mode, which means that there’s no attempt to return it to Earth for a soft landing.

That’s because Amos-17, the satellite SpaceX is launching on behalf of Israeli company Spacecomm for this mission, weighs over 14,000 lbs – meaning it needs all the fuel on board the Falcon 9 to achieve its target orbit, leaving none remaining for an attempted controlled decent.

The launch will, however, include an attempted recovery of the nose cone fairing that protects the satellite during the ascent phase. SpaceX has managed to catch the fairing once before during a launch, using a ship at sea called ‘Ms. Tree’ which was fitted with an extra large net. Recovering the fairing is a big cost savings for SpaceX, as is recovering the Falcon 9 booster, all of which contributes to SpaceX’s goal of achieving 100 percent reusable launch capabilities.

When we go online to communicate, hang out or play, we’re typically logging on to platforms conceived of and built by men.

Mark Zuckerberg famously created Facebook in his Harvard dorm room. Evan Spiegel and his frat brother Bobby Murphy devised a plan for the ephemeral messaging app Snapchat while the pair were still students at Stanford. Working out of a co-working space, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger built Instagram and yes, they also went to Stanford.

Seldom have social tools created by women climbed the latter to mainstream success. Instead, women and girls have battled the lion’s share of digital harassment on popular social platforms — most of which failed early-on to incorporate security features tailored to minority user’s needs — and struggled to find a protected corner of the internet.

Squad, an app that allows you to video chat and share your phone screen with a friend in real-time, has tapped into a demographic clamoring for a safe space to gather online. Without any marketing, the startup has collected 450,000 registered users in eight months, 70% of which are teenage girls. So far this year, users have clocked in 1 million hours inside Squad calls.

“Completely accidentally we’ve developed this global audience of users and it’s girls all over the world,” Squad co-founder and chief executive officer Esther Crawford tells TechCrunch. “In India, it’s girls. In Saudia Arabia, it’s girls. In the U.S., it’s girls. Even without us localizing it, girls all over the world are finding it.”

Squad, the social screen sharing and group video chat app, has pulled together a $5 million investment led by First Round Capital.

Learn from the best but get rid of the shit

A remote team of six people led by Crawford, who’s a graduate of Oregon State University, Squad’s compelling founding story and organic growth helped them close a $5 million seed round led by First Round Capital general partner Hayley Barna, the only female partner at the historically all-male early-stage investment fund known for being the first institutional check in Uber.

Betaworks, Alpha Bridge Ventures, Day One Ventures, Jane VC, Mighty Networks CEO Gina Bianchini, early Snapchat employee Sebastian Gil and Y Combinator, the startup accelerator program Squad completed in the winter of 2018, have also participated in the funding round.

Crawford describes Squad, which she’s built alongside her co-founder and chief technology officer Ethan Sutin, as the “anti-bro startup.” Not only because it’s led by a woman and boasts a cap table that’s 30% women and 30% people of color, but because she’s completely rewriting the consumer social startup playbook.

“We are trying to learn from the best in what they did but get rid of the shit,” Crawford said, referring to Snap, WhatsApp, Twitch and others. Twitch, a live-streaming platform for gamers, has become a social gathering place for Gen Z, she explains, but like many other communities on the internet, it’s failed its female users.

“Girls have been completely pushed off of Twitch,” she said. “The Twitch community didn’t want them there and they weren’t friendly to them. For boys, there are places you can go to consume content with other people, like Fortnite, but for girls there hasn’t been a place that’s really broken out. We want to be a place where girls can come and hang out.”

What Crawford and the small team at Squad have realized is that you don’t have to sacrifice growth for user safety and comfort. From the beginning, Squad has made sure users could easily block and report inappropriate behaviors and users, a feature that was an afterthought on many other social tools. They also made users unsearchable unless another user knows their exact username. By prioritizing the security of its primarily female audience, Squad is betting girls will continue coming back to the app and telling their friends about it.

“It’s possible to make girls feel safe and still have growth as a consumer product,” she said. “If people don’t feel safe on your app, they won’t stick around long-term.”

A new playbook

Squad quietly launched in January after pivoting away from building an information-sharing tool called Molly, which was backed with $1.5 million from BBG, Betaworks, CrunchFund and Halogen Ventures. Crawford’s now 14-year-old daughter unintentionally inspired the transition, when she proposed her mom create an app where she could peer into her best friend’s phones from afar.

This reporter and Squad CEO Esther Crawford discuss the startup’s growth via Squad video chat.

Using Squad, people can browse memes, pore through DMs, plan a trip on Airbnb, peruse Tinder or a photo album with a friend via its video chat and screen share features. As Crawford describes it, it’s all the stuff you don’t want to post to Snap or Instagram but want to show your best friends. An app that may seem frivolous or non-essential seems to have quickly become a space online where girls can are opting to spend hours intimately engaged with their friends — without fear of stumbling into a troll.

“People can use this digital tech to hang out together instead of it being so performative,” Crawford said.

The downside of Squad’s screen sharing capabilities is a user can view another user’s Facebook friend’s profile, even if, say, they themselves were blocked from viewing that content. Most apps are available for viewing through screen share aside from premium video streaming apps like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video, so its entirely possible someone could use Squad solely for the purpose of viewing social content they are otherwise barred from seeing. In response to this possibility, Crawford says they are considering alerting users when their Squad chat’s been screen-shotted. To avoid additional privacy issues, Squad users can’t record or save anything from their calls or replay what happened on Squad.

Like many early-stage startups, the company isn’t making any money yet because the app is free and without ads. As soon as next year, however, Squad plans to monetize the product with in-app purchasing, scraping another rule from the consumer social playbook that has long encouraged companies to expand their user base first before trying to profit off users at all. (See: The Snapchat Monetization Problem).

Techno-optimism

Crawford, a product marketing veteran, grew up in a cult in Oregon where girls were barred from wearing makeup and from watching television or listening to music. But because the internet was so early, the dangers of it were yet to be discovered and miraculously, she was allowed to go online. Quickly, she made connections with people all over the world thanks to everyone’s favorite messaging tool at the time, AOL Instant Messenger.

The experience planted in her a deep love for the internet and a desire to share her life online. After developing a community through AIM, Crawford became one of the very first original content creators on YouTube and garnered millions of views on her videos. Without trying, she became an influencer, long before the term entered the zeitgeist.

She used her newfound digital prowess to launch one of the first social marketing agencies, where her clients included Weight Watchers and K-Mart, legacy brands that had no idea how to tap into her native digital communities. Ultimately, Crawford landed in the tech startup world, hopping from Series A startup to Series A startup, offering up her product marketing skills before her daughter’s idea prompted her to go into business on her own again.

“I’m a techno-optimist and yet, so many of these tech companies we thought were going to connect people turned out to have accidentally made people more lonely,” she said. “With a different lense and approach, I thought there could be an app that built bridges.”

Now with a new bout of funding, Squad can implement strategic marketing campaigns, continue adding integrations with complementary platforms (the startup has just announced a new integration with YouTube) and hire product designers. The next few years will be critical to Squad’s success as it looks to young people to give them a permanent spot on their home screen.

For Crawford, what’s most important, aside from growing group of teenagers using Squad, is to make sure only good people see a big payday thanks to her great idea: “I am ready to do everything I can to make Squad successful and make sure our success has a positive downstream effect so that we have great people on our team that get rich off our success.”

Apple Card is getting its first group of public test users today. A limited amount of customers that signed up to be notified about the release of Apple Card are getting the ability to apply for the card in their Wallet app today — as well as the option to order their physical Apple Card.

I’ve been using the card for a few days on my own device, making purchases and payments and playing around with features like Apple Cash rewards and transaction categorization.

A full rollout of Apple Card will come later in August. It requires iOS 12.4 and up to operate.

The application process was simple for me. Portions of the information you need are pre-filled from your existing AppleID account, making for less manual entry. I had an answer in under a minute and was ready to make my first purchase instantly. I used it both online and in person with contactless terminals.

It…works.

The card on the screen has a clever mechanism that gives you a sort of live heat map of your spending categories. The color of the card will shift and blend according to the kinds of things you buy. Spend a lot at restaurants and the card will take on an orange hue. Shop for entertainment related items and the card shifts into a mix of orange and pink. It’s a clever take on the chart based spending category features many other credit cards have built into their websites.

As many have pointed out, if you’re the kind of person that maximizes your points on current cards towards super specific rewards, like travel miles, the rewards system of Apple Card will not feel all that impressive. This is by design. Apple’s aim on this initial offering was to provide the most representational and easy to understand reward metric, rather than to provide top of category points returns.

But it also means that this may not be the card for you if you’re a big travel points maximizer.

I am a points person, and I carry several cards with differing rewards returns and point values depending on what I’m trying to accomplish. Leveraging these cards has allowed me to secure upgrades to higher classes, first class flights for family members and more due to how much I travel. Getting to this point, though, required a crash course in points values, programs and a tight grip on what cards to use when. Shout out to TPG.

You will not be able to leverage Apple’s card in this way as a frequent traveler. Instead, Apple decided on a (by comparison) transparent rewards methodology: cash back based on a percentage of your purchases in 3 categories.

Those categories are 3% on all purchases from Apple Stores, the App Store and Apple subscriptions, 2% daily cash on any Apple Pay purchase and 1% with the physical card either online or offline.

The cash rewards are delivered daily, and made available to you very quickly on your Apple Cash card balance. Usually in less than a day. You can then do an instant transfer to your bank for a maximum $10 fee or a 1-3 day transfer for free. This cashout is faster than just about any other cash back program out there and certainly way faster cash reward tallying than anyone else. And Apple makes no effort to funnel you into a pure statement credit version of cash back, like many other cards do. The cash becomes cash pretty instantly.

I could easily see the bar Apple sets here — daily rewards tallies and instant cashouts — becoming industry standard.

The card interface itself is multiples better to use than most card apps, with the new Amex apps probably coming the closest. But even those aren’t system level, requiring no additional usernames and passwords. Apple Card has a distinct advantage there, one that Apple I’m sure hopes to use to the fullest. This is highlighted by the fact that the Apple Card application option is present on the screen any time you add a new credit card or debit card to Apple Pay now. Top of mind.

The spending categories and clear transaction names (with logos in many cases) are a very welcome addition to a credit card interface. The vast majority of time with even the best credit card dashboards you are presented with super crappy list of junk that includes a transaction identifier and a mangled vendor ID that could or could not map directly to the name of the actual merchant you purchased from. It makes deciphering what a specific transaction was for way harder then it should be. Apple Card parses these by vendor name, website name and then whatever it can parse on its own before it defaults back to the raw identifier. Way easier.

A note, during the setup process the card will ask you if you want it to be your payment default for everything Apple and will automatically attach to your Apple stuff like App Store and subscription payments. So keep an eye out for that and make a call. You will get 3% cash back on any apps you buy, of course, even if they’re third party.

The payments interface is also unique in that Apple is pushing very hard to help you not pay interest. It makes recommendations on how to pay chunks of your balance over time before you incur interest. It places 1-3 markers on the circle-shaped interface that show you how much you need to pay off minimum, minimum with no interest and in full. These markers are personalized a bit and can vary depending on balance, due date and payment history.

I really dug hard on how Apple Card data was being handled the last time I wrote about the service, so you should read that for more info. Goldman Sachs is the partner for the card but it absolutely cannot use the data it gathers on transactions via Apple Card for market maps, as chunks of anonymized data it can offer partners about spending habits or any of the typical marketing uses credit card processors get up to. Mastercard and Goldman Sachs can only use the data for operations uses. Credit reporting, remittance, etc.

And Apple itself neither collects nor views anything about where you shopped, what you bought or how much you paid.

And, as advertised, there are no fees with Apple Card.

One thing I do hope that Apple Card adds is an ability to see and filter out recurring payments and subscriptions. This fits with the fiscal responsibility theme it’s shooting for with the payments interface and it’s sorely lacking in most first party apps.

Some nice design touches beyond the transaction maps, the color grading that mirrors purchases and the far more readable interface is a pleasant metallic sheen that is activated on device tilt.

My physical card isn’t here yet so I can’t really evaluate that part of it. But it is relatively unique in that it is nearly featureless, with no printed number, expiration, signature or security codes on its surface.

The titanium Apple Card comes in a package with an NFC chip that allows you to simply tap your phone to the envelope to begin the process of activating your card. No phone numbers to call and, heavens forbid, no 1-800 stickers on the surface of the card.

I can say that this is probably the first experience most people will ever have with a virtual credit card number. The physical card has a ‘hard coded’ number that cannot be changed. You never need to know it because it’s only used in in-person transactions. If it ever gets compromised, you can request a new card and freeze the old one in the app.

For online purchases that do not support Apple Pay, you have a virtual card number in the Wallet app. You enter that number just as you would any other card number and it’s automatically added to your Safari auto-fill settings when you sign up for Apple Card.

The advantage to this, of course, is that if it’s ever compromised, you can hit a button to request an entirely new number right from within the app. Notably, this is not a ‘per transaction’ number — it’s a semi-permanent virtual number. You keep it around until you have an issue. But when you do have a problem, you’ve got a new number instantly, which is far superior to having to wait for a new physical card just to continue making online purchases.

Some banks like Bank of America and Citibank already offer virtual options for online purchases, and third party services like Privacy.com also exist. But this is the beginning of the mainstreaming of VCCs. And it’s a good thing.