This Could Be Apple’s Biggest Innovation Since the iPhone

Time writes about the future of digital wallets, This Could Be Apple’s Biggest Innovation Since the iPhone.

That “it” refers to virtual wallets – smartphone apps meant to replace the need for credit cards and cash. Virtual wallets have been a drop-dead obvious idea since at least 2011, when Google launched its much heralded Google Wallet for Android, i.e. “tomorrow’s billfold.” Three years – and nearly half a billion dollars in investment later – the Google Wallet has been largely ignored by consumers. Meanwhile, competitors like Square and its Square Wallet app have also officially thrown in the towel.

Rather than play along with Google Wallet, many carriers have blocked access [to the secure chip that stores credit card info on the phones] and started competing offerings themselves (like Isis, the virtual wallet from AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon). The result: fragmentation of the nascent wallet market and huge headaches for Google. “With Google Wallet, we had one point of failure,” explained Jonathan Wall, the project’s founding engineer, “the carriers [used] the necessity of hardware to really block the product.”

Indeed, Apple seems to have all its ducks in a row for a headlong plunge into the virtual wallet space: hundreds of millions of users’ credit card numbers on file; a device people carry with them at all times to hold these numbers; and even a fingerprint system to authenticate transactions (ensuring that stolen iPhones, for instance, can’t be used for payments). “Apple is absolutely the sleeping giant in the payments world,” explains Forrester Research’s Denee Carrington. “They have the capability; they just haven’t tied it all together.”

iBeacon is the other piece that Apple is rolling out. See Apple Patent Reveals Secure iWallet System with iBeacon and Apple's first iBeacon hardware revealed in FCC application. Rather than say Apple "just [hasn't] tied it all together" I'd say the other companies haven't tied it all together and Apple is doing so slowly and deliberately.