Slideshow ( 2 images ) The Omaha, Nebraska-based financial firm said on Tuesday it was allowing customers to fund their accounts with a debit card in their Apple Pay digital wallets.

Using the wallet and a system called Apple Business Chat, TD Ameritrade customers with Apple devices can transfer up to 10,000 a day to their accounts and have access to it immediately, a feature the brokerage says is a first in its industry.

Previously, customers had to either use a wire transfer, which can be complex, or wait for several days before being able to access transferred funds.

When a customer wants to put money into a TD Ameritrade account, we gave them the same choices they had in the 1970s and 1980s, she said.

The key, Tuteja said, was accepting debit cards to handle funding the accounts.

Many consumer transfers still happen over the so-called Automated Clearing House, or ACH, system, which traditionally took several days to clear.

While the group that oversees the ACH system has worked to speed it up, debit card infrastructure in the U.S.

But TD Ameritrade had not been sure debit cards complied with all the legal rules around funding brokerage accounts.

Tuteja said TD Ameritrade chose Apple Pay to start with because of its ease of use, security and the fact that about three-quarters of the brokerages clients use the iOS operating system.

In the future, the brokerage hopes to extend the system to other digital wallets, such as those offered by Alphabet Incs Google or Tencent Holdings Ltds WeChat.

All the regulatory work we did, and all of the back-end work, all of that is built in a way we can extend it, she said.

Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Lisa Shumaker Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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