Today, however, there’s a lot of confusion surrounding digital wallets and mobile payments since these terms are interchanged so frequently. To be clear, a digital wallet is simply tokenization of data. While digital wallets are often associated with payments, they can be used to issue digital rewards, tickets or boarding passes, room keys, or identification.
Mobile wallets are basically the mobile version of a digital wallet with five types of mobile payments:
- The mobile wallet. This is arguably the most hyped-up type of mobile payment, aka the “tap and go” method where your smartphone’s built-in NFC (Near Field Communication wireless technology or Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is used to make a payment using your smartphone.
- Mobile as the point of sale. This is when a merchant uses their mobile device to process payments. Square is one the most well-known examples of this.
- The mobile payment platform. In a nutshell, these are the companies like PayPal that allow you to make peer-to-peer payments to your friends or pay a merchant online. These top payment solutions will be the future of payments.
- Direct carrier billing. This when you purchase an app or game on your smartphone and the charge is put onto your cell phone bill.
- Closed loop payments. These are mobile payment systems built by a company, for example, the Starbucks mobile app.
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