A year after resurrecting its Wallet product, Google is stacking the app with services to make it a central location for a wide range of consumer transactions and activities.
The company on Thursday made several updates to Google Wallet, focusing on health care and travel services, with potential use cases such as personal identification, airline boarding and other activities. The upgrades come as rival Apple has used Apple Pay and its own wallet to promote cross-selling within Apple's universe by offering consumers a hub for their virtual payments cards along with authentication services.
"There are a lot of different places to store these experiences," said Dong Min Kim, director of product management at Google Wallet. "We want to create one space."
Google laid the groundwork for a more expansive Wallet in May 2022, when it brought back the
In the 12 months since its launch in 39 countries, Google Wallet now works in more than two dozen additional nations. This week, Google expanded the Wallet to streamline the way consumers' different digital products work with each other and with payments.
"We want the payment to complement other things that you want in a wallet, such as your identity, tickets, receipts and stuff like that," Kim said.
The upgrades enable users to upload images of items with bar codes and QR codes including library cards, gym cards and other membership cards and convert them into passes. There is also an option to save health insurance and pharmacy cards as digital cards in Google Wallet.
Other updates include adding driver's licenses or an ID card to Google Wallet. It will initially launch in Maryland, with Arizona, Colorado and Georgia coming online in the next few months. Consumers can additionally add boarding passes directly from Google's Messages app.
"The driver's license is a critical part of a wallet, [and] it's one of the things that people provide by default," said Kim.
The strategy is as much about simplifying how people engage with Google as it is about developing new technology. Consumers for years have used Google Pay or other Google services to store digital credentials.
"At a very basic level you already have people using Gmail and Google Drive to organize their lives," Kim said, adding there's an opportunity to improve that experience by integrating different Google services with Wallet.
This week's update follows the February launch of
Apple similarly stores credentials in a wallet and payments through Apple Pay. Apple is also expanding its payments-related products, recently adding a
There have been some efforts to make mobile wallets more like personal assistants by integrating them with other apps, such as travel, said Aaron McPherson, a principal at AFM Consulting.
"For example, today you can store your boarding passes in your wallet from the travel app you used to make the reservation or at least administer it," McPherson said, adding the importance of this is to draw users into making use of the wallet's other functions — which requires more integrations.
"There is a lot of potential in the mobile wallet that hasn't been utilized, and part of this may be the difficulty of partnering with companies who see Apple and Google as threats," McPherson said.
The growth of mobile wallets is tied to the broader trend in financial services toward building
PayPal, Block and firms outside of finance like
"Wallets are a unique type of app," said Aaron Press, research director for worldwide payment strategies at IDC.
While most apps rely on user engagement to maximize data collection, advertising consumption and commissions for leading consumers to purchases, digital wallets have the additional ability to directly monetize a transaction, Press said.
"So, for example, if a consumer books travel from within a wallet, then the wallet is the default payment method, and the wallet provider benefits with every transaction, regardless of the funding source," Press said. "The more transactions that occur from within the wallet, the more money the wallet provider receives. It's an attempt to move from 'top of wallet' to 'top wallet.'"
