Wells and 3 other banks new wallet to compete with Apple Pay.

Some US Banks are pooling resources and planning to offer a Payment Wallet to their customers.

The offer is being tied to choice of a participating bank by the customer.

First difference to Apple Pay

This is the first key difference to Apple Pay – you will see the customer is being directed ti a choice of bank first, and credit card secondarily.

The acquisition approach is where the coverage gets murky for me but in fairness is still being worked out. The customer must choose the new wallet and provide an email address. This must be an email with an associated phone number. Knowing how emails are gathered and the murkiness surrounding use of the email could be confusing for new wallet signups.

Methodology – current thinking

That email will be used to ping to ping the participating back end, EWS and involve consumers’ typing their email on a merchant’s checkout page.

The merchant system would ping EWS, and use its back-end connections to banks to identify which of the consumer’s cards can be loaded onto the wallet. Consumers would then choose which card to use or could opt out.

Second difference to Apple Pay.

A fair bit of processing has occurred but no indication of how the wallet app comes in.

Conclusions

This is an interesting start and worth following.

• it feels more bank centric than customer
• customers are required to make choices on credit card and on bank
• banks will go on an email address acquisition strategy
• sign up, clunky as it appears will be ever harder in store for the customer, employee and required new equipment

An interesting move that suggests an alternative to Apple Pay, Google Pay and Venom, that needs fleshing out and we will follow.

Link

Banks Plan Payment Wallet to Compete With PayPal, Apple Pay

Financial institutions behind Zelle are working on a wallet for consumers to use at online checkout

One goal of the new service is to compete with third-party wallet operators such as PayPal Holdings Inc. PYPL 0.52% and Apple Inc.’s AAPL 2.35% Apple Pay, according to people familiar with the matter.

The wallet will be launched with Visa Inc. V -0.06% and Mastercard Inc. MA 0.61% debit and credit cards, EWS said. EWS reached out about the initiative to other card networks, including Discover Financial Services DFS 3.91%, to gauge their interest in enabling their cards to be loaded onto the wallet.

The wallet is being designed to roll out with credit cards since that is how U.S. consumers are used to shopping..

Fox Business News and WSJ

The banks expect to enable 150 million debit and credit cards for use within the wallet when it rolls out. U.S. consumers who are up-to-date on payments, have used their card online in recent years and have provided an email address and phone number will be eligible.