Many in the payments industry have long imagined a world without leather wallets or the plastic cards inside them. And now that vision is becoming a reality as numerous digital wallets are being rolled out to consumers. Visa and MasterCard are rolling out their digital wallets this year, a significant step in transforming how consumers shop and pay, adding to the proliferation of options already out there.
“It is an emerging space and solutions are being launched every day,” says Zilvinas Bareisis, a senior analyst at financial consultancy Celent. Among these solutions are those where the wallet is stored in the cloud and can be accessed from a mobile device, or wallets where the payment credentials are stored on the phone itself.
