Money20/20: What’s in your digital wallet?

Trust and a focus on the customer journey are essential for adoption

Digital wallets are already transforming the way we go about our daily lives. Jumping on the train, boarding a flight, or buying a cappuccino have all become easier thanks to digital payments and passes.

A panel at Money20/20 Europe, moderated by Jenny Cheng, vice president and general manager of Google Wallet, discussed the digital wallet ecosystem and how these industries are coming together to create an accessible, safe and convenient digital wallet experience.

David Levy, head of product management at SNCF Connect and Tech, and Christoph Beckenbauer, general manager at LEGIC Identsystems, joined Cheng on the panel, to discuss what it will take for a digital wallet to truly replace a physical one.

The main takeaways from the panel were trust and the user experience. Without trust, people won’t feel safe storing their financial information and identification details.

And the user experience must be frictionless, and superior to using a physical wallet, otherwise they won’t make the switch.

On what it will take for customer adoption, Levy said: “There needs to be trust and it needs to be something that you can rely on.

“If customers trust our company they will use the wallet, because they trust the brand. The customer journey is really important.”

Trust will also come down to who owns the data and information. Beckenbauer said: “The information should be owned by the user. It is super important.”

And although there are some people who will always refuse to use a digital wallet, younger generations increasingly do so as standard, so adoption in the future is likely to increase.

Having everything in one place—train ticket, plane ticket, hotel card and ID—will improve the customer journey. But, to achieve this, the stakeholders behind all these essentials need to be brought together.

A lot of work still needs to be done to realise the full potential of a digital wallet. But storing our identification cards in our digital wallets is just around the corner. And in a decade, having a way to store your digital valuables may not be a handy feature, but a necessity.

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Image: kentoh via Canva

Josh Poyser Josh Poyser is an editor at FinTech Intel. He has written about fintech for several years and appeared at FinTech Connect 2023 on the 'Unlocking Success: The Art of Fintech PR' panel.