Mountain View, California — Amid several high-profile departures from its Google Wallet team, the search engine behemoth has endorsed a new deal to acquire New York-based payment technology company TxVia in a bid to bolster its Wallet product, which has recently taken a PR battering.
On a positive note, Google VP Osama Bedier disclosed the acquisition in a blog post on Monday, describing the deal as a way to complement the capabilities of its Google Wallet payment service and to ‘facilitate innovation towards our full Google Wallet vision’.
However, financial terms of the acquisition were not revealed.
Moving forward with full vigor, Google Wallet represents the search giant’s thrust into the physical payments space in a bid to replace the physical wallet with an NFC-powered, Android smartphone.
Google Wallet presents a way to stack mobile payment service credentials on one’s mobile phone. Google has now partnered with the payment industry’s bigwigs of town, including Citibank, Visa and Mastercard for credit card payments. It also issues its own prepaid cards for those who prefer an alternative.
Hence, the phone user can make purchases using any of those services–MasterCard PayPass, for example–through NFC technology, which enables wireless payments. Along with the capability to make payments, Google Wallet supports online offers and loyalty point programs as well.
The search engine giant now presents TxVia to support its Wallet as one of the best choices in the world for payments and “a technology pioneer that offers a fast, flexible and highly reliable payments platform”. TxVia will complement Google’s payments capabilities and accelerate innovation towards its “full Google Wallet vision,” Bedier said.
Google has already worked closely with TxVia over the last year. “Since 2008, TxVia has supported the management of more than 100 million accounts,” wrote Bedier. “They have partnered with some of the best brands in the industry, and their leadership team has played an instrumental role in defining the fast-growing prepaid card segment of emerging payments. In this time, TxVia has also certified and directly connected to the major payment networks, which establishes a solid foundation for Google Wallet and our partners to drive innovation on a global scale and in a partner friendly way.”
Google Wallet, a virtual wallet for payments online, is facing competition from payment processors like PayPal and mobile carriers backing alternative mobile payment systems.
The Google Wallet mobile app is currently available for payment in-store on select mobile phones running on Sprint’s network. Other carriers like AT&T Mobile, T-Mobile USA, and Verizon Wireless are currently focused on building a competing Isis mobile platform through a joint venture.
“Finding and purchasing products is a big part of day-to-day life,” adds Bedier. “At Google, we are striving to devise new ways to improve the commerce experience. We have worked closely with TxVia over the last year, and they are a forward-thinking team that will help us take the next steps in realizing the future of commerce. We welcome the TxVia team to Google.”
A message on the TxVia site says:
For more than 5 years, TxVia has been delivering groundbreaking processing solutions to enable new and increasingly complex forms of payment. We’re delighted to announce that as of April 2, 2012, we are continuing that mission at Google.
Success in payments requires not only innovative technology and operational excellence but also broad collaboration. As part of Google, we look forward to expanding our partnerships with both the payments industry and a wide variety of other organizations that are pioneering a new era of commerce.
In another surprising news, one of the pioneering engineers behind Google Wallet just quit Google to go to Square, which has its own digital payments offering in Pay With Square. It is going to be interesting to watch these two companies, along with PayPal and others compete in this space going forward.