With the advent of smartphones our lives have changed for the better. So far smartphones have replaced our music players, yellow pages, maps among so many other things. And starting from today it is replacing our wallets as well. Google Wallet service has been made available for the Nexus S 4G customers on US Carrier Sprint which will enable them to make payments for their purchases with a simple tap of their phones.
The Google Wallet app will have Google offers, loyalty cards and your credit cards in the form of “Google Prepaid Cards”. For now Google has tied up with CitiMasterCard which works using Citi’s PayPass system. But soon the product will be expanded to other customers as well, and you will be able to set up a Google Prepaid Card using your credit cards. The Google Wallet is a fairly simple system wherein you can “tap and pay” using your smartphone and Near Field Communications (NFC).
The system requires a smartphone with an NFC chip embedded into it which enables you to tap and pay at registers enabled with Citi’s PayPass system. With more than 300,000 PayPass locations around the globe and growing, more often than not you will be able to find one. At the same time Google plans to incorporate other financial giants like Visa, Discover and American Express which have already provided their specifications for them to be included in Google Wallet. Google will also shortly include other Android devices in its portfolio of its Wallet compatible devices.
Osama Bedier, Vice President of payments at the Google, dismissed any security concerns with Google Wallet by stating that the technology is even more secure than our conventional credit cards allowing one to lock, decommission or even remotely delete credit cards from the app. He further went on to add that the NFC chip self destructs in case it detects any attempts to tamper with it.
The NFC technology already exists in other countries, including Japan which is where Bedier was first introduced to the technology, with Google eventually launching it in the US today.
Stephanie Tilenius, Google’s Vice President for commerce and payments describe Google Wallet as the ‘next generation of mobile commerce’ which enables one to make payments using NFC and redeem offers at the same time, all this while shopping offline.
See the Google Wallet demonstration video below:
