This report looks at Apple’s assets and speculates how the company might use them to enter the payments space more aggressively.

There has been a lot of buzz lately that Apple is getting more serious about payments. Considering Apple’s track record of seriously disrupting the industries it chooses to enter, it is no surprise that Celent clients are keen to understand how Apple might move into payments and the resulting implications.

Apple is notoriously secretive, and we don’t claim to have any inside knowledge of the company’s actual plans. However, in the report Apple in Payments: What to Expect?, Celent makes educated guesses and assumptions about how Apple could play a bigger role in payments.

“Many brilliant engineering brains are working at Apple, so it is only fair to expect that Apple will surprise us all,” says Zilvinas Bareisis, Senior Analyst with Celent’s Banking Group and author of the report. “However, it is notoriously difficult to ‘crack payments.’ It requires specialty skills and big investments. Just because Apple has many relevant assets, including patents, it does not mean that this endeavor will be easy for them.”

This report reviews various payment-related Apple assets, including relevant patent applications. Based on Celent’s understanding of the payments market and analysis of Apple’s assets, the report describes a potential roadmap for Apple into the payments industry.

This 18-page report contains six figures and concludes with a brief assessment of key implications for the payments industry.