This innovation was a joint venture of three corporations; Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile. However, on February 2015, Google Inc acquired the intellectual property of Soft Card and henceforth undertook to integrate it into its Google Wallet Service. This service has partnered with MasterCard and Visa to in the provision of its services. Later in 2013, the Google Wallet service integrated with Google Mail (G-mail). This invention allowed users to send money through Gmail attachments. (Handa, Saraf, & Maheshwari, 2011).
Success of Mobile Wallet Technology in Namibia and Armenia. .
The success of mobile wallet technology in these two countries will be inevitably different given their economic and geographical disparities. A conglomeration of factors is bound to determine whether either Apple Pay or Soft Card (now Google Wallet) or both succeed in each of the countries. I will begin with Namibia. From my analysis, the Soft Card service is more likely to succeed in Namibia as opposed to the Apple Pay Service. This is due to various reasons. First of all, the Apple Pay mobile application is compatible is to only iPhones 5, 6 and the Apple Watch. It is common knowledge that Namibia is a developing country with a relatively high poverty index that estimated by the World Bank to be 62%. The same data also marks it as one of the countries in the world with the highest gap between the wealthy and the poor. 42.6% of citizens live below the poverty line. Yet, the price of the cheapest iPhone in Namibia is approximately N$14,000 that is equivalent to US$ 750. (World-Bank, 2014) So this begs the question, what is the percentage of the population that can afford the smart phones required to access the Apple Pay service? From the statistics, the figure will be very marginal, unless the service will be target a specific cadre of citizens from the wealthy group. But, will it be economically viable to target such a small population? In contrast, the Soft Card Service has made their service very easily accessible.
