NFC Times Exclusive Insight – As global mobile wallet providers Google, Samsung and Microsoft race to deliver multichannel payments to stay on par with Apple, all three have chosen to add online payments to their mobile wallets by integrating with the digital platforms of one or both of the two largest U.S. payments networks, Visa and Mastercard.
Of the three, perhaps the furthest along is Google, which announced this week it had signed deals with both Visa and Mastercard to link Android Pay to the networks’ respective online payments platforms, Visa Checkout and Masterpass.
That is not the only way Google and the others will add in-browser and in-app payments to their wallets, complementing the NFC functionality and–in the case of Samsung, proprietary MST technology–they use to enable consumers to make in-store payments. They are also implementing in-app payments on their own and using budding payments standards of the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, to support in-browser payments from their wallets.
