What is a Digital Wallet?

Pardon me for such a naive question but I think there might be reasons discussing this a bit.

In a physical wallet you simple take out (select) the payment instrument (check, card, cash, etc) to use while the rest of the process is carried out in an entirely payment-instrument-dependent way.

A digital wallet would (as a minimum) allow you to enumerate, select and initiate a payment process while the actual payment process would as in the physical wallet case be depending on the selected payment instrument.

Now to my "problem"...

http://www.w3.org/2014/04/payments/webpayments_charter.html
"Development of technical standards is not in scope for the Interest Group"

http://www.w3.org/2014/10/payments.html.en
"The Interest Group will first focus on digital wallets, which many in industry consider an effective way to reduce fraud and improve privacy by having users share sensitive information only with payment providers, rather than merchants"

This goal seems awfully hard to combine with not developing technical standards.

Since recommending somebody else's wallet solution would be politically incorrect, the only realistic deliverable appears to be a set of requirements for actors to consider when selecting a particular wallet solution.  Personally I don't see this as a natural task for a technical SDO like W3C.

FWIW, people associated with the WebPayment CG have already published a couple of wallet schemes:
https://github.com/playbanq/WebWalletAPI
https://mobilepki.org/WebCryptoPlusPlus

Although the solutions are quite different, it is worth nothing that they both put themselves inside of the actual payment transactions.

Regards,
AndersR

Received on Sunday, 19 October 2014 09:05:19 UTC