RE: Wallets

Hello Adrian,

As one of the guys who has been propagating the wallet as a paradigm for quite some while, I can only support your notion.

As to the aggregation of wallets through a (meta-)wallet, I have no real idea whether that is a good idea. As an example, we’ve been tinkering about how a web-based online payment service (let’s call it ‘PayPay’) might be integrated into such an approach. And indeed, we could either think of a ‘PayPay representation as a virtual card carrying the usual login credentials (or parts of it) and consequently referring to your source of funds pre-configured in your PayPay account.

But we could also imagine a parameter being passed alongside with the credentials to specify a source of funds with every use. In this case we’d have been able to model it as ‘ABC bank’s VISA (or Master)Card’ - or even your ‘ABC bank service card’ for any direct-debit configuration you might have – without the bank even knowing! (Yes, this stuff should be good to spend years and millions at courts all over the world… it’s just academic for now ;-)

With respect to these options, I am not sure what cascaded wallets would be good for, but in the end I’d like to go with cascaded wallets anyway, because I think that every call for the resolution of a payment transaction on the user’s side should implement the same API.

As an alteration of was already proposed: a simple default function in the browser might just be able to hold one payment instrument. The ‘supported schemas’ submitted by a payee might not do much more than allow the default function to either accept or deny further processing, but everything else essentially appears to require the same API irrespective of a single payment instrument or a full-fledged wallet with a dozen of instruments being present on the user’s side. Seem pretty consistent to me.

Cheers,
                Jörg

From: Adrian Hope-Bailie [mailto:adrian@hopebailie.com]
Sent: Freitag, 26. Juni 2015 15:24
To: Web Payments IG
Subject: Wallets

While I originally supported the motion to avoid the word wallet I think it is doing more harm than good. I think we need to provide a definition of the thing that performs the functions we think a wallet requires for it to be a useful part of the v1 recommendations of the WG and stick to that definition and call it... a wallet.

To that end, and in keeping with what I believe to be the accepted scope of v1 of the WG's work I define a wallet as being what many call a "passthrough wallet". It is analogous to a real-world physical wallet in that it holds a set of payment instruments and provides a standard interface for external applications to those instruments. It may also hold value (cash) but this should be accessible via the interface in the same way as any other payment instrument (i.e. The calling application addresses the stored value in the same way as it addresses stored payment instruments). In other words a digital wallet does what a physical wallet does so it seems sensible to call it a wallet.
The fact that Apple have renamed Passbook to Wallet should be a hint that this is a good idea: http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/08/apple-rebrands-passbook-to-wallet/


Where the analogy drifts a little is in the digital context when the wallet performs some of the functions that the wallet holder performs in the physical world such as selection of payment instrument or even online-online functions like getting tokens to use instead of real card numbers. I'm still not convinced that is a good enough reason not to call this a wallet and make everyone's life easier.

Further, a wallet should be capable of being stored in another wallet if that wallet chooses to act as an aggregator of wallets (i.e. The interface into wallets should be designed to accommodate such a use case). This is important in preventing scheme owners from making it difficult for wallet vendors to incorporate the scheme into their wallets. i.e. There is no incentive to provide a wallet for only your scheme and make your scheme difficult to integrate into wallets as other wallets will simply incorporate your wallet into theirs.
That said, it is important that we define how much the W3C can do to promote openness and how much we can do to enforce it.
I am going to word a version of the PAWG charter using wallets for clarity and see how that sits with everyone.