First Generation Contactless Mobile Wallet

Google Wallet was the first generation contactless mobile wallet that preceded Apple Pay, Android Pay, and Google Pay. With the Google Wallet app, users can store credit cards on their phone’s secure element. When a user tapped their mobile phone on an NFC pin pad at checkout, the credit card info is sent to the payment processor via the cloud.

Constraints

• NFC (near field communications) only allowed for one-way communication from the phone to the PIN pad. The phone does not receive information back from the PIN pad, but through the cloud.
• It was impossible to provide users transaction data such as line items.
• If a merchant is not a Google partner, the only information that can be shown is that a transaction happened, not the dollar amount or retailer name.
• Google Wallet only worked on a few Android phones where we could get access to the phone’s element.
• Not all retailers had NFC v, or had the feature turned on in their stores.
• No incentive for retailers to partner with Google Wallet. The front effort was very high for no immediate benefit.