With him launch of the Apple Card in 2019, Apple fell squarely into the financial products category. Of course he did it thanks to a partner the bank owned by Goldman Sachs, which has grown in the consumer sector in recent years. It was the latter who in November 2019 was accused of being sexist when granting credit levels on the Apple Card.
Now a year and a half later an investigation in New York exonerated the bank any unlawful discrimination. An accusation which, as we will see, was made by an elder critical from Apple.
Goldman Sachs Did Not Discriminate Apple Card Users On The Basis Of Gender
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. did not use discriminatory practices in deciding whether to grant credit to potential customers of its Apple card, the New York Department of Financial Services said.
A regulator’s analysis found no evidence of intentional discrimination against women, the department said in a statement Tuesday. It also found no evidence that the entity’s credit decisions had different effects on certain groups of people.
Bloomberg echoes the news, which Goldman Sachs is pleased with by certain statements. The entity added that it remains “committed to providing fair and equitable access to credit” for all of its customers. Of course, the New York Department noted that shortcomings in customer service contributed to a “feeling of lack of transparency”.
The DHH tweet that sparked investigations into possible gender discrimination in Apple Card credit management.
Apple is not a bank and does not intend to be, mainly because it is not its area of expertise. Strict industry regulations represent a significant barrier to entry for anyone, so from Cupertino they decided to join forces with someone already in it: Goldman Sachs. Since 2016, it has relaunched a consumer brand called Marcus, in honor of one of its two founders.
As we said at the time in Applesfera, bank scoring must respect the legality but also protect the bank from abuse or scams.
In November 2016, an Apple Card user reported discrimination in the treatment and credit offered by the entity and Apple Card for his wife. It was then that the controversy broke out, already rejected by the bank at the time. However, it’s worth taking a closer look at who claimed responsibility for the alleged injustice two years ago.
DHH, an old critic of Apple
David Heinemeier Hansson, acronym for DHH, is the Founder and CTO of Basecamp and a heavy tech user of Twitter. Lately was quite critical of Apple, on your App Store account. If the name sounds familiar to you but you can’t quite get it, it’s because last summer they launched a messaging app called Hey.
From the start, the app acted as a pediment and forced users to register through the web, instead of the app, to bypass the IAP requirements of the App Store. For him, were rejected in the App Store Apple at the start. Oddly enough, they asked Basecamp for similar favorable treatment as Epic Games demanded from Fortnite.
DHH has resorted to controversy in recent years to gain notoriety in tech media and social media
Finally, Hey ended up adapting to the rules by launching a version of the app that offered the ability to sign up for free users. For those of you following the Epic Games affair, It will seem to you that Basecamp is also one of the signatories of the coalition against the App Store launched last year. The same is behind the efforts to break Apple’s control over app distribution that have been achieved recently by various state legislatures in the United States.
DHH is therefore not a neutral party in your attack on the Apple Card. His polemics raised in recent years against the tech giant have had an impact on media and social networks, generating, in Hey’s case, a warning that I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.
