It’s yet another black day for mobile wallets.
Visa unveiled a new service today called Visa Checkout that lets users conduct e-commerce transactions. The service essentially replaces V.me, Visa’s mobile wallet product, and can be seen as a pullback from mobile payments at the point of sale into the simpler e-commerce and m-commerce space. The www.v.me URL now forwards to Visa Checkout.
The Visa Checkout service allows users to check out in a PayPal-like manner on a number of partner websites. It’s hard to tell if V.Me is being rebranded as Visa Checkout or if one product is being replaced by another.
“V.Me wasn’t wildly successful and there were some issues with it,” said James Wester, research director for global payments at IDC. “One of the things Visa has to deal with is that it has no connection to consumer or merchants — the bank remains the issuer in the transactions. It’s hard to insert yourself into a payment when you have no access to begin with.”
Visa CEO Charlie Scharf said today that, “The important thing is this is not a wallet… it’s a digital form of the card you love.” Scharf continued to downplay digital wallets, saying, “[This is] just about simplification of payment… When you talk to consumers and you talk about wallets and you hear what they say… most consumers don’t understand the concept of a digital wallet.”
MasterCard made a similar move at the end of 2013 with MasterPass, pulling back from the point of sale into the safer world of online and mobile commerce.
Visa slighted digital wallets in its Visa Checkout press release, as well. Senior vice president of digital solutions at Visa, Sam Shrauger, said “People aren’t looking for another wallet — they just want a simpler way to pay online, particularly on mobile devices, and that’s exactly what we designed Visa Checkout to do.”
Wester thinks that this is a smart move on Visa’s part:
I think that this is something Visa had to do. Visa needed to make it less about calling it a digital wallet and getting away from that [phrase] and saying “Let’s stop talking about mobile wallets but just paying with your phone and making difficult transactions easier,” is probably smart… It’s a good stepping stone towards increasing their mobile presence and understanding mobile transactions, in general.
“How a transaction happens doesn’t matter — what matters is how easy it is,” Wester added. It looks like Visa agrees. By moving away from wallets towards simplifying e-commerce transactions, Visa Checkout looks to help Visa reclaim some ground in the digital payments space.