Re: What is a Digital Wallet?

I think it's a very valid and important question, since it could help us
arrive at a common understanding and terminology.

For me, a digital wallet is a resource that is able to:
  *1.* Store credentials
  *2.* Participate in transactions

However,

> any definition of "wallet" is going to be so generic and useless as to
not help direct the work

Then, I would suggest to change the term/question to "What is a Web
Wallet?" (as I argued in
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webpayments/2014Oct/0105.html).

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

+1.

Jorge Zaccaro
Fundador, Playbanq SAS
Bogotá D.C., Colombia

+57 300 673 0039
+1 650 614 1707
www.playbanq.com

On Sun, Oct 19, 2014 at 4:04 AM, Anders Rundgren <
anders.rundgren.net@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
>