Google NFC Europe: one wallet to rule them all

Google's mobile wallet

Google bad boy Osama Bedier, vice president of payments, gave a presentation at NFC Payments Europe 2011 conference in London touting Goolge’s mobile payment offering.  While saying that the product will be open, Bedier also stressed that there only needs to be one wallet on a phone.

NFC Times Bedier quotes:

“We found that European partners were willing to move faster (than in the United States),” he said. “There is a better understanding of the whole space. The ecosystem is more collaborative than in the states.”

“We started by pulling together a partnership with some of the biggest brands in the U.S.,” he said in response to a question during his presentation today. “And we intend to do that in almost every geography. And if it wasn’t clear from my presentation, our plans are to expand globally.”

Osama Bedier, Google’s vice president of payments

“In terms of other wallets, there can be only one wallet at any one time,” Bedier said in response to a question from NFC Times. “Now we’re open to other wallets existing at other points of time. We’re open to consumers choosing whether it’s our wallet or someone else’s wallet.”

“What we’re trying to accomplish with the open wallet platform, instead of everyone creating their own wallet, they would join on this open (Google) wallet platform,” he told NFC Times, adding: “We’re good at software.”

“It doesn’t make sense from a consumer’s perspective to say your Google Wallet can only have Google Offers,” he said. “We want to have other offers. Consumer choice is a really an important principal to our design and philosophy of our wallet.”

“We’ll work with whoever owns that secure element to make sure we can manage it, Bedier said. “I think ownership and management are two different things.”

And that’s where is gets sticky

“I doubt that it would be acceptable for the operators in Europe,” Jörg Heuer, who leads the research and development team developing an NFC mobile-wallet program for Germany’s Deutsche Telekom Group, told NFC Times. “For my company, that would create a connection between two brands on a level that is just not what we would like to see.”

“There’s got to be (a wallet war),” said Nick Holland, senior analyst for the Yankee Group. “Google and Isis are directly conflicting.”

Of course this was all foreseeable.  Its not likely that the credit card companies, telcos and new tech companies are all going to wade into a 6.2 trillion dollar pool and play nicely.