Mobey Forum, which represents players in the financial sector, is forming an expert group on digital wallets to explore use cases and commercial opportunities for participation in beyond payment solutions.
Customer-focused payment demand has led to innovation from physical payment cards to contactless payments and now a few dominant virtual pay providers such as Apply Pay integrating their services with another hot trend – digital wallets.
While a few main players are notably in control of the recent growth of virtual pay options, and capitalising on the pioneering digital wallet, other companies are wanting to insert themselves among this lucrative ecosystem and diversify the landscape of Apple and PayPal.
The Digital Wallet Expert Group will link up practitioners and members of the Mobey Forum to identify who the power players are, assess consumer trends and technology advances to stake out their role in the burgeoning digital identity ecosystem.
Mobey Forum helps its members consider the route to launching digital technologies. Mobey Forum’s Mobile Wallet Working Group published a series of insights in 2012 and 2013 whitepapers on competition players.
Mobey Forum’s report, “the rise of digital identity wallets: where will banks play” reflects the unique opportunity that banks have to “expand their portfolio of services to become brokers of trust in the trust-based digital economy or ‘Digital Trust Economy’, where entities including people, businesses, and machines can exchange data with each other in a reliable and trustworthy manner”.
Consumers have boosted the demand of digital wallets, prompting pay providers to explore the commercial opportunities of integrating their services with wallets. In America, one of the key global markets for digital wallet expansion, 66% of people expect to have a digital wallet by 2023.
The expert group is founded on the belief that banks should be evolving beyond the traditional trust services they provide to relate to customers’ growing financial and life needs. Digital identity also offers banks the opportunity to be more embedded in their customers’ lives and hold a strong position of trust.
Elina Mattila, Executive Director of the Mobey Forum said: “As more consumers rely on digital wallets to store everything from plane tickets to identity credentials, it’s clear that banks have an important role to play in the growth and evolution of the ecosystem. Our Expert Group aims to help banks build on their strong positions of trust to establish prominent roles in the development of the infrastructure that supports digital assets, identification and trust services, open banking, and embedded finance.”
On the board of chairs, Marina Repo comments: “Market developments have brought digital wallets back to the very centre of all financial players’ strategies. The new Expert Group will help all banks, together with those stakeholders engaged with them, to determine the best course forward, with the collaborative goal of ensuring that new digital wallet offerings evolve to deliver maximum value for the customers they collectively serve.”
