Google Remains Committed to mWallet

The path toward mass adoption for its mWallet has been littered with hurdles for the normally invincible Google, but the online search giant remains committed to its payment project and optimistic about its future.

“We have been doing this for a while,” Google head of payments Ariel Bardin said during a presentation Wednesday at the Electronic Transactions Association’s Transact 2014 trade-show, reports cNet. “And we’ll continue to keep doing this for a long while.”

Bardin went on to note that the hurdle for Google to overcome with near-field communication, or NFC, which required complicated interactions with phone hardware.  Though Google is sticking with NFC for tap-and-pay functions, it is moving its focus to host card emulation (HCE), a cloud-based system that greatly opens up what can be designed into their mobile pay system.

“The technology we initially used relied on hardware,” Bardin told the crowd. “And there were a bunch of hurdles to get it out the door using that approach. So we asked ourselves if we could emulate the secure element in software, and make it a core service in Android.”

Google has many advantages in the mWallet market, particularly its massive gMail email network that can be integrated, but also many established competitors, like PayPal. As payments reported earlier this week, there are also wild cards like Apple and retailers to contend with.

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