Google is working on a simple new way to pay for goods in brick-and-mortar stores with your smartphone, according to a new report.
The Information says the new software will be called ‘Plaso’, and will take on Apple Pay by making it even easier to pay with contactless technology.
To pay with Apple Pay currently, you need to place your smartphone on a contactless reader in a shop, with your phone’s built-in NFC chip doing the hard work of transferring digital dosh.
Plaso, however, will make it so customers won’t even need to take their handsets out of their pockets.
Instead, customers walk up to the cash register, give the tiller their initials, and walk off with the goods.
While that might sound like daylight robbery, users will actually be paying via Bluetooth, with the initials acting as a validation mechanism.
Bluetooth has a much higher effective range than NFC, which means you won’t need to slap a handset down on a pad either.
According to the report, Google has been working on Plaso since autumn 2014, and is currently testing the technology via employees.
Apparently, Google hopes to one day integrated Plaso with its existing Google Wallet platform. That’s great news, because Google Wallet has suffered comparatively poor uptake compared to Apple Pay, despite launching years before.
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Although we can’t substantiate this report right now, it’s worth mentioning that Google looking to up its contactless payment game is entirely unsurprising.
Apple Pay’s ease of use and rollout plans makes it hugely attractive to customers who might otherwise opt for an Android device.
One potential problem with Plaso is that using initials to verify a payment doesn’t seem entirely secure, so we’ll have to wait and see what Google has cooked up in terms of keeping our payment credentials safe from prying eyes.