Mobile wallets remain a rocky road
While many payment experts believe the mobile wallet will be part of the future, the takeoff for the system remains grounded. There are again rumors that Apple will be incorporating NFC technology into the new version of the iPhone and create an iWallet solution that will be unveiled at the upcoming Worldwide Developers convention. However, this has persisted for several years and nothing has come of it.
While there are some versions of mobile wallets available, it remains a rocky landscape.
In a recent blog post from LifeLock, the company announced that it was pulling its "Lemon Wallet" application from all app stores. According to company chairman and CEO Todd Davis, this is being done because the app may not be fully compliant with payment card industry (PCI) security standards.
LifeLock purchased the application for $50 million in December. It allowed users to take a picture of their credit card to add it to their digital wallet. Here it is converted to a barcode that contained the card number, security code and expiration date. They were able to scan their devices to checkout at participating merchants.
Now the company is telling its estimated 4 million users to delete the app for the time being.
"We have taken steps to delete all stored information for the mobile app from our servers. Even though we have no reason to believe the data has been compromised, we believe this is the right thing to do," Davis said. "We'll be working to return a Wallet with the highest level of PCI compliance to users soon."
Mobile commerce is going to be part of the future of payment processing, but there is still work to do.