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New guide brings order to teeming mobile wallets market

For fintech followers keeping an eye on alternative payments, the 2016 Mobile Payments Today guide organizes scores of mobile wallets into an easy-to-compare format.

August 19, 2016 by Suzanne Cluckey — Owner, Suzanne Cluckey Communications

This month, Mobile Payments Today, a sister publication of ATM Marketplace, released the 2016 Mobile Wallet Comparison Guide, a compendium of the industry's top mobile wallets.

Whether you're an executive from a bank, digital wallet provider, retailer or software developer, this guide can serve as a cheat sheet of sorts. It includes: 

• detailed attributes for each mobile wallet — target market, payment methods, POS compatibility, security requirements, P2P functionality and more;
• contact information for each featured mobile wallet and its company; and
• commentary from editor Will Hernandez on recent industry developments.

And, like all products from ATM Marketplace and Mobile Payments Today, the guide comes with a money-back guarantee. If, for any reason, this report doesn't meet your expectations, simply email us and we'll give you a refund. No questions asked.

Following is an excerpt from the intro to the guide, written by Mobile Payments Today Editor and industry expert Will Hernandez:

In the weeks after Mobile Payments Today asked companies to supply information for the 2016 Mobile Wallet Comparison Guide, a number of events transpired in the industry that highlighted the peaks and valleys of today's market:

• Barclays launched the Barclays Contactless Mobile, which enables the bank's customers to make mobile payments with NFC-enabled smartphones (via the Android-based banking app) at stores with contactless terminals in the U.K.
• Wells Fargo in May announced Wells Fargo Wallet as a feature within its Android-based mobile banking app and officially launched it nationwide in the U.S. in July.
• Visa introduced the Visa Digital Commerce App, an issuer-branded mobile commerce product that enables financial institutions to offer their own mobile apps to customers. Apple added an online checkout option to Apple Pay, while Android Pay and Samsung Pay expanded to more countries.
• While we don't technically consider it a mobile wallet, Walmart Pay rolled out across the U.S.
• Chase Pay, which is based on the technology from the much-maligned Merchant Customer Exchange, will not debut until the third quarter of 2016.
• Semble, a New Zealand joint venture involving banks and telcos, announced it will discontinue its current mobile-payment service following a strategic review of the business.
• Mastercard and Visa each made significant announcements that will affect mobile payments in the future. Mastercard is enabling banks to add Masterpass to Android mobile banking apps so that consumers can conduct NFC-based mobile payments. Visa and PayPal are working together to make the PayPal mobile app more widespread as an in-store mobile-payment option.
• The future of Zapp, a U.K. mobile payments provider developed by Vocalink, is up in the air, as Mastercard recently acquired the parent company.

And that list doesn't include smaller providers who announced enhancements to their mobile wallets over the summer. This industry often tries to figure out if this is the year for mobile payments. While 2016 isn't the year, mobile wallets are more mainstream with consumers than ever before. Whether consumers are using those products on a widespread scale is another story altogether.

But we're here to talk about what's available in the market today. While it's almost impossible to track every single mobile-wallet provider worldwide, we're here to help give you an inside look into some of them.

The Mobile Payments Today Mobile Wallet Comparison Guide gathers in one spot a compendium of nearly 100 mobile wallets, compiling their differing capabilities in an easy-to-compare format.

We asked mobile-wallet providers a wide range of questions about their products. We eliminated some questions from last year and added new ones based on the changing market. Software developers provided us answers about their consumer-facing features as well as some other details that might not be important to everyday users, such as security settings.

Our guide is intended to act as an introduction to these providers, not as a substitute for a comprehensive overview of each product. This guide offers just enough information to introduce you to this market and help you get started on the path to a possible partnership (or acquisition).

This year's guide contains fewer entrants than the 2015 version because we decided to be more stringent with our requirements: If a mobile wallet was not available to the general public, we didn't include it in the guide.

A "wallet" that is restricted to a single retailer also was not included. A mobile app with a payment component is something we don't consider a true mobile wallet. We did, however, make a few exceptions upon further review of the products. We included some white-label products in the guide. In the future, we plan to recognize mobile retail apps that contain a payment feature.

What you won't find listed in this guide are any of the Pays or offerings from companies such as Alibaba. Those providers did not complete the survey this year or last. So, please keep that in mind as you use this as a resource.

This guide can serve as a cheat sheet of sorts. What is your competition doing? Which features are they finding success with? Is there something they are doing that you're missing? Is there a chance to collaborate, or even combine assets into one company? There seems to be a lot of collaboration going on in the market at the moment.

There's no telling what this guide will look like next year. But based on all the news we've seen in 2016, consumers are about to have a lot more options. Whether that leads to widespread use remains to be seen.

Purchase and download the 2016 Mobile Wallet Comparison Guide 2016

About Suzanne Cluckey

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Suzanne’s editorial career has spanned three decades and encompassed all B2B and B2C communications formats. Her award-winning work has appeared in trade and consumer media in the United States and internationally.