Google announced the launch of a prepaid card linked to Google Wallet yesterday. The move continues Google Wallet’s move away from contactless payments using near-field communication (NFC) and brings it in line with the Isis mobile wallet, which incorporates the American Express Serve prepaid card.
Prospective users of the Google Wallet prepaid card, which is a MasterCard-branded card and allows ATM access to funds, need to be in the US and hold a verified Google Wallet account.
Google also announced the release of a holidays reward program for Google Wallet alongside the card announcement. A few restaurant chains and Amtrak were named as participating companies.
Google Wallet launched in September 2011 and has been the object of intense media scrutiny ever since. The service has undergone numerous growing pains — launching then shuttering a “virtual prepaid card,” testing then abandoning a Discover card attached to the wallet and moving away from NFC as the facilitator of contactless payments.
Mobile bank account Moven, a service that also bet on contactless, was forced to distribute NFC stickers and issue a debit card as well. It seemed the world (or the U.S., anyway) was not ready for contactless payment, nor was Apple.
Earlier this year was a dark time for mobile wallets. Isis and MCX stalled, and Google Wallet also appeared to be flagging, but the May 2013 announcement that funds could be sent via Gmail — with a linked Google Wallet account — suddenly made Google Wallet an attractive option for Gmail’s 425 million users.
P2P payments allowed users to exchange money with each other, but with Google Wallet’s point-of-sale tie-ins at Jamba Juice, Walgreens and other retailer going mostly unused, getting money out of a Google Wallet account was a more difficult prospect than getting it in.
The Mastercard-branded prepaid card, which can be ordered here and is said to arrive within 10 to 12 days, closes that loop. It also serves as a hedge against the possibility of mobile phone-based payments at the point-of-sale not happening. Purchases on the card trigger notifications on the mobile app, so the card can be seen as a halfway step to mobile wallets much in the manner of the recently overhyped Coin. And because it’s Google, there will be data generated from the card’s use that can be put to use in marketing.
so what is the benefit of using this card over my debit card for which I get miles? Only looks like a scheme from Google to gain more information on me so they can sell that information to marketers. Don’t they get enough of that when they look through my gmail or search? lame product!
How does this make Google “get away from NFC”. Please clarity what you are talking about when saying NFC… are you talking about transmitting card data over NFC at the POS or are you talking about storing Card data on the secure element on the phone? In either case, clarify how this new product “gets Google away from XYZ”?
NFC was meant here in terms of payment at the POS. With cards, this will not happen as often. It was not happening often anyway. A shoe store experimenting with Google Wallet contactless payments saw something on the order of a dozen transactions over three months, and a cashier at a local Walgreens told me she had seen Google Wallet used once in the few months it had been operational. I have a hunch the card will be used more often, thereby moving the Wallet away from NFC payments.
Ok, so then I believe you are thinking too narrowly. It’s not a plastic card OR an NFC-enabled mobile wallet, it is AND. They will both co-exist and putting out a plastic card that can also be used as a stored-value card in the digital wallet is genius. It simulataneously gets adoption with old-school plastic that can be converted to mobile NFC usage eventually, and places a stored-value card in the front of the wallet enabling Google to disintermediate any bank the customer puts in the wallet. This battle is not about NFC vs. whatever, it’s about customer mind-share in banking. Google is simply giving away banking for ad revenue.. how will banks compete with that? Well they can’t. Banks will either lobby with the government to not allow Google-type wallets to store their credit card data without permission (or devise a technical solution to do the same) AND/OR banks will just be white-label bank providers to Google Wallet, tech-giant 1, tech-giant 2, etc. and lose the customer forever. My bet is number 2. Storing and transferring money is as simple as Email, customers will not pay for such a simple digital commodity in the future.