Google Wallet, the American way of NFC

Google has been working on Google Wallet for a long time. We’ve seen the first NFC payment experience via Google Wallet when it was released with a Citi prepaid card on Nexus. The first version came with a pre-installed Citi prepaid account and a 10 dollars. It was a big step for NFC world. Google made a huge step for popularizing the mobile payments. There was a minor setback when it was hacked but Google immediately fixed it.

Now Google Wallet 2.0 has been released and this time there is really an innovation that you’d expect from Google. Google is a cloud company, every Google service gets you to cloud, so why wouldn’t its wallet do the same thing? There is a great idea behind the new wallet, it keeps your card data on the cloud and uses a prepaid card on phone, which works as a frontend processor, or let’s say a contactless/NFC interface to your credit card in the cloud. This way, you can use any of your cards without actually enrolling it on your NFC phone — Nexus, in our case. What a brilliant idea, just as clear as I’d expect from any new Google service.

This is a kind of implementation you’d never see in Europe. Here in Europe, we are using EMV for NFC and it works in a more complex way. Of course it is possible with EMV but it would be far more complex than charging a transaction to a card stored in the cloud via an EMV transaction flow -and with current implementations of NFC in the MNO dominated ecosystem.

It seems we will be in wallet wars for some time more and let’s keep our thumbs up for Google for the smart move. Another big step for the NFC World.

Take a look at Google Wallet in action below: