Google officially launched Google Wallet on the NFC World Congress yesterday. At the House of Marketing we believe that Google Wallet will be a disruptive innovation. It will change our shopping experience as it works seamlessly together with Google Offers and loyalty cards by automatically redeeming coupons and adding loyalty point when checking out. A feature I’m looking forward to as I don’t have enough space in my leather wallet for all my loyalty cards, consequently missing out a lot of discount.

The big question remains how open this system will be. Google is talking about an “open commerce ecosystem” and stated that they want to support as many payment cards as possible but what about other discount services like Groupon or Facebook Deals? If you ask me they should try to integrate these discount services if they really want to change our shopping experience.

Google Wallet is an Android app that can be used to make offline payments and use loyalty cards and coupons.

Stephanie Tilenius, Google’s vice president for commerce and payments, has described Google Wallet as the “next generation of mobile commerce.”

“We’re building an open commerce ecosystem that for the first time will make it possible for you to pay with an NFC wallet and redeem consumer promotions all in one tap, while shopping offline,” Tilenius said.

NFC or Near Field Communication is a technology that allows for simplified transactions, data exchange, and wireless connections between two devices in close proximity to each other, usually by no more than a few centimeters.

At this moment the NFC technology is only integrated in the Nexus S, 4G but is it expected that in 2014 half of the mobile devices in the US will contain this technology or 150 million devices. In the meanwhile you can put a NFC sticker on your device to use this technology.

Google wallet is already compatible with Mastercard, American Express and VISA and aims to support all plastic cards in your wallet.

Download the word cloud of mobile payment buzz words made by my colleague Dennis De Cat. This will get you started in the mobile jargon. You can click on each word to read more about it.

Also watch the announcement of Google on Youtube:

Bart De Bodt,

Consultant at The House of Marketing