As governments pressure Apple to open more of its technology to the outside world, the mobile wallet industry is becoming more crowded.
Curve, a London-based payment company, has launched Curve Pay, a mobile wallet available on Android devices with plans to launch on iOS devices in the next few months. The catalyst for the move was
"If they did not open NFC, we couldn't launch Curve Pay," Curve CEO Shachar Bialick told American Banker.
Curve Pay replaces an earlier user experience in which consumers had to add their Curve card to Apple Wallet Pay and complete the transaction through Apple Pay.
Curve Pay includes a payment card that connects to Curve's existing wallet that includes a menu of payment options, financial management tools and incentive marketing programs.
In this way, Curve is positioning its new mobile payment app as more of a rival to "
"It's not just about having a convenient way to tap and pay, but the challenge for consumers is about their finances," Bialick said.
Curve Pay, which launched in the U.K. and the EU with plans to expand to other markets, adds a mobile wallet function to an existing product mix that includes a payment app, credit and debit cards that enable users to consolidate other payment card accounts and to switch card accounts after a payment is made to manage overdraft risk, using advanced
Curve received a
The company also supports cryptocurrency investment and is developing what it called "agentic commerce," using new forms of artificial intelligence to aid shopping, payments and customer service.
Alternative mobile wallet providers will be less reliant on Apple to access the technology, though they will still need to beat Apple at user experience.
Curve is not alone in targeting Apple Pay. Other mobile wallets, such as
There's a massive market at stake. Digital wallets make up about 50% of global e-commerce spending. That's on pace to reach $25 trillion by 2027, according to Worldpay, which says digital wallets also make up 30% of all global point of sale volume.
"The question out there is that now that the technology is out there to support mobile payments, do the new wallets meet the needs of the consumers?" Bialick said.
A proliferation of mobile wallets could also complicate the industry. The definition of a digital wallet is morphing into different categories of wallets, from hardware-based (such as Apple or Google) to app-based wallets like Curve Wallet and PayPal to proprietary wallets offered by financial institutions or retailers such as Walmart, said Thad Peterson, a strategic advisor for Datos Insights.
"Each wallet type has different strengths and limitations, but all of them need a large consumer base holding and using the wallet, and a ubiquitous merchant base that can accept wallet transactions," Peterson told American Banker.
Curve has an extensive customer base and by using Mastercard rails, it also has access to merchants, according to Peterson, adding Curve also reflects the challenge of differentiation in the wallet space by offering a broader array of rewards and card-management tools to drive consumer usage.
"Now that Apple is opening up their wallet to outside developers and the number of wallets in multiple form factors proliferates, the race will be to create differentiable value to a wallet to drive consumer usage," Peterson said.
Wallets are quickly becoming the default payment type, with many already in the marketplace.
Similar to P2P and other new offerings, adoption is key, and there is only space for a few key players, Tony DeSanctis, a senior director at Cornerstone Advisors, told American Banker.
"I'm skeptical of new mobile wallets because very few folks cannot get their needs handled by Google Pay, Apple Pay, PayPal, or ShopPay," DeSanctis said. "I'm not sure there is a real market for more solutions in the space."
