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EBay Inc. and its PayPal subsidiary are suing Google Inc. and two former PayPal employees, accusing them of stealing trade secrets for the search engine giant's new mobile wallet service.
May 27 -
Google's planned announcement of a mobile wallet today is the company's second chance — after Google Checkout — to establish itself as a major name in payments.
May 26 -
Google Inc.'s new mobile payment system puts pressure on Isis, the wireless carrier-backed joint venture trying to develop a competing system.
May 26 -
Not content to compete just against terminal makers, the San Francisco company will challenge established players in the mobile payments field when it allows consumers to initiate transactions at the point of sale without a card.
May 24
American Express Co.'s top executive tried to poke holes in Google Inc.'s new mobile wallet, arguing in favor of a competing payments system his company is testing.
Google Wallet faces an uphill battle because it relies on specific types of smartphones and will require many retailers to upgrade their payment terminals to use it, Amex Chairman and Chief Executive Ken Chenault said Wednesday during a presentation at the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC Strategic Decisions Conference in New York.
Amex's Serve alternative payment service sidesteps those issues, Chenault argued, because it is compatible with any merchant that already accepts Amex cards.
"We are device-agnostic," he said. "We are also agnostic relative to funding. You can fund from any source."
Chenault added that he does not "underestimate the power of Google" and its partners.
Google last week announced it is working with Citigroup Inc., MasterCard Inc., Sprint Nextel Corp. and other companies on a service that allows consumers to make payments from a mobile application on phones using Google's Android operating system.
Using a technology embedded in some smartphones called near-field communication, or NFC, consumers can pay for purchases by tapping their phones against a retailer's payment terminal.
Initially consumers can fund transactions only from certain MasterCard-branded cards issued by Citi, though Google Wallet also includes a Google-branded prepaid account that can be funded by any existing debit or credit card. Google said it plans to work with other banks.
The service, which Google is testing now in New York and San Francisco, is also initially limited to the consumers with the Nexus S, the only Android smartphone that contains an NFC chip. The service requires that merchants have terminals capable of "reading" information passed from the phone's NFC chip.
"They are reliant on NFC technology," Chenault said. "The one thing you want to be careful about with merchants is, you've got to convince them to switch out their existing terminals or do it side by side."
Amex announced its Serve service in March. Serve is a virtual account that works similarly to PayPal Inc.'s alternative payments service.
Customers can link any existing bank or card account to fund it and can use Serve to make purchases online or, by using an attached card, at the point of sale.
"We at least have a merchant network that we can leverage immediately," Chenault said.
Amex has been testing Serve with merchants in Eugene, Ore. Chenault would not provide specific findings from the pilot program but said the company has found the results encouraging.
"We're going to ramp up the marketing more because we've been pleased with the progress that we've seen thus far in Eugene," Chenault said.
