On May 11 was held the first part of the Google I/O, the annual conference organized by Google in San Francisco. During this event, the subsidiary of Alphabet announced the arrival of Google Wallet, its digital wallet.
Google Wallet brought back to life
Google Wallet has been resurrected. It had been terminated in 2018 during its merger with Android Pay to become Google Pay. Mountain View revealed that a new version of its virtual wallet is coming in the next few weeks.
The change in the head of the U.S. antitrust authority
The application will offer its users to store their various cards, whether bank or loyalty cards, in order to use them directly with their smartphones or connected devices. It will also be possible to store one’s ID card, driver’s license, concert tickets, vaccination certificates or membership cards.
Google Pay will not disappear from Android phones. The app will continue to exist primarily as a payment tool. Arnold Goldberg, vice president and general manager of payments at Google, describes Google Pay as ” a complementary application to Google Wallet “. It adds, ” See [Google Pay] as a higher value application that will allow you to make payments and manage money, while Wallet will really be this container used to store your payment assets and non-payment assets “.
Virtual Cards, a feature designed to protect bank data
The conference was also an opportunity for Google to announce its new Virtual Cards service. This one allows to generate a temporary card number to allow its users to pay online. Only Google will have access to the real bank details. This is an additional protection for online purchases. The Californian company has assured that it does not take any commission on the transactions.
This is what the Virtual Cards interface could look like. Image: Google.
When making a payment on a website, Virtual Cards will take care of creating a temporary fake card to avoid any risk of hacking sensitive data. The feature will be added directly to Chrome, Google’s web browser which is also the most used browser in the world. For the moment, it is only planned to be released in the United States for Visa, American Express and Capital One cards. Google has not communicated on a possible arrival of this service in Europe.
If Google is going backwards with Google Wallet, it’s to catch up with iOS. Apple is one step ahead of the Internet giant: last September, it was already offering digitize your identity papers within Apple Wallet.
