The banking system in America has come a very long way over the past 100 years. While checking was a major advancement several decades ago—followed, of course, by the remarkable debit card system—the entire world is changing. Technology continues to improve, and with it, comes many advances that the early banking system—the Founding Fathers—surely never thought would likely come to be.
With the development of digital payment systems, the banking world has been in great flux. Mobile banking, of course, has made it easy to monitor your checking account and move money around as you need it, even apply for loans, but the new digital payment systems has all but removed the need to extract a card to pay for anything.
PayPal, of course, has led this industry for years. Owned by E-bay, PayPal lets users all over the world buy and sell by transferring money over the internet regardless of their native local tender. Over the past few years, we have seen many other forms of digital payments develop, similar to PayPal, hoping to piggyback its success.
Google Android Pay and Apple Pay, then, have emerged of late as yet another way to pay online. The hope, of course, is to streamline the process by using mobile phones.
And if we can trust Microsoft—one of the industry leaders in software and personal computing—Google’s Android Pay [and Apple Pay] may be on the right path. It looks like Microsoft is getting into the virtual payments game with their new digital application Microsoft Wallet. Obviously, this is an attempt for Microsoft to more quickly approach the success of Android phones, which, of course, all have access to the user-friendly Android Pay feature.
Windows has not had much success in the mobile field, with Windows phones lagging far behind the success of Android phones. And since Android phones are so popular, Microsoft is going to have a lot of ground to make up.
Indeed, Microsoft’s attempt to foray into the mobile/digital payments field certainly asserts Android’s heavy lead in the market. But when you also observe that Barclays will also launch an Android Pay rival, it seems that Google remains at the forefront of whatever trends that may come to pass.
