Mostly sounds like Goldman Sachs is terrible at their job and signed a bad contract.
The article mentions that Goldman signed the contract as a way into the consumer credit market and it looks like they want out. Out of both the Apple deal and consumer credit card market. So it sounds like they made some pretty big and terrible decisions here. Not just the deal with Apple but the entire strategy.
Hearing they don’t even get a cut of transaction fees really raised my eyebrows.
Between 0% interest rates for Apple products, customers who pay off their entire balance, and customers who just don’t pay their balance at all, there’s thousands of ways for them to straight lose money and only one way to make money (balance carrying users who actually pay their bills)