Apple Pay may well be the poster child of contactless payments right now, but it seems the fledgling platform’s fame has also boosted Google Wallet’s user-base.
According to ‘a person with knowledge of the matter’, as reported by Ars Technica, Google Wallet has seen ‘considerable growth in the last couple of months.’
The mystery tipster reckons weekly transactions have gone up by 50 per cent recently, a likely result of sudden public interest in NFC-fuelled wallet relief.
New users have also doubled in recent months according to the report, signalling a healthy boon for Google’s payment platform.
Google Wallet launched on September 19, 2011, over in the USA, where it has unfortunately remained up until this day.
It’s still not clear when the service will roll out globally, but it’s fair to say Google’s missing out on a healthy chunk of global payment solution market share as a result.
Google Wallet works in much the same way as Apple Pay, in that the service makes use of NFC chips to make secure payments at brick-and-mortar retail stores equipped with contactless readers.
In May last year, Google announced that it was integrating its Wallet service with Gmail, allowing users to shell out cash to contacts directly through e-mail.
While Apple Pay is seeing much more in the way of publicity than Google Wallet, it’s had a pretty rocky start thus far.
A selection of US retailers banded together to shut out Apple Pay in the wake of the launch of their own payment platform, CurrentC.
Despite the setbacks, Apple Pay did manage to register upwards of 1 million bank cards in the first 3 days.
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Via: Ars Technica