Preparing for the future of payments, fintech, and travel.
I am a graduating business management student targeting roles in consulting, product management, and marketing across payments, fintech, and travel.
This interest is personal. Apple Pay, Apple Wallet, and Apple Card changed how I handle money: they let me save more, shop smarter, and travel easier. That is what turned me toward the small details that decide whether a product actually works for the people using it.
My work starts from hands-on curiosity: I live in the points, miles, and cashback community, optimizing every dollar for travel. That curiosity turned into three kinds of work:
- Product marketing: benchmarking the Apple Card against cards such as the Samsung Galaxy Card, then repositioning its rewards so everyday spenders see the value.
- Product management: redesigning Apple Card features and building the decision screen a cardholder would see in Apple Wallet.
- Consulting: modeling the Apple Card migration economics and dissecting the Visa and Mastercard interchange settlement to see who pays and who benefits.
Case studies across payments, fintech, and travel.
Apple moves 12 million cardholders to a new issuer, and nothing about the card itself has been announced, so a straight handover with the same product is a real possibility. Three chapters, read through the three lenses that decide whether a card portfolio works: a better card, with a rewards system and benefits worth keeping, a business case that keeps the losses from moving across the portfolio, and a decision screen a cardholder would actually see.
Goldman lost more than $3B and never turned a profit, with 34% of borrowers subprime. Re-underwrite every account on a five-factor risk score, weighing Delinquency history, FICO Score 8, Credit utilization, Annual income, and Account history, so how someone actually pays can outrank their score and the losses do not move across with the portfolio.
Closing an account takes the history with it. A third outcome routes people to Chase Freedom Rise, where 12 months of on-time payments graduate them to the Apple Card, and the model puts 59.26% of them there. Anyone who clears neither bar gets a written reason and the Path to Apple Card guidance instead.
Against ten cashback cards, the legacy Apple Card’s everyday rate finished dead last, with its 3% locked to a fixed partner list that barely changed in six years. Take Apple purchases to 4% and the wallet rate to 3%, the two that decide whether the card is the one people reach for first, then keep marketing past launch, because top of wallet is won every day rather than at signup.
A settlement 21 years in the making, reported everywhere as a win for merchants. The order cuts swipe fees, but the more durable change is that it rewrites who controls card acceptance. I read the terms themselves, separated the order from the settlement everyone confuses it with, and traced what it does to merchants, to the rewards programs interchange pays for, and to the cardholders who earn from them. The headline rate cut turns out to be the least interesting part.
Coverage led with the rate cut. The durable change is acceptance: merchants can now decline premium credit at the product level, and that right has no expiry while the price relief runs five years.
It is available to everyone and usable by the larger operator. Small merchants cannot negotiate interchange or surcharge in every state, so the leverage lands where the leverage already was.
Rewards are funded by the fee being cut. The analysis follows that chain to premium cards, transfer partners, and the households who optimize around them, without projecting a number the record cannot support.
Independent case studies for portfolio purposes. The Apple Card work is an Apple-inspired concept, not an official Apple product, and is not affiliated with, authorized by, or endorsed by Apple, Visa, Mastercard, Chase, or Goldman Sachs. Scenarios are hypothetical, and every figure shown traces to a named source file in my own models. Company names, card products, and trademarks referenced belong to their respective owners and are used for identification and commentary only. Please do not reproduce, republish, or reuse this material without written permission.