Rise of the Mobile Wallet

Two more major m-payments announcements were made this week, as the digital wallet space continues to heat up.

Mobile wallet news was flying fast and furious this week. First, Visa and PNC bank announced they would be teaming up on a virtual wallet product.

The bank announced it would make Visa's V.me digital wallet scheme available to its existing 1.2 million PNC Virtual Wallet customer accounts, with a commitment to make V.me available to more than 6.3 million accounts in 2013. PNC is the first U.S. bank to integrate with Visa's new digital wallet service.

In addition to PNC Visa cards, consumers are also able to enroll their other U.S. issued payment cards through the V.me site and make online purchases at participating merchants by entering a username and password.

This comes on the heels of another V.me announcement of a partnership with 1-800-Flowers to allows the virtual payment product as a checkout option on the site.

Meanwhile, Isis announced it would make its long-awaited debut in October after a few false starts.

Visa clearly is looking to compete with PayPal, Square and others in the online and mobile payments space with its announcement, whereas NFC-based Isis is more of a point-of-sale solution, at least for now. But one thing is for certain: the mobile wallet market is only just heating up, and consumers will have numerous options available to them. And like PNC, banks would be well served to partner with companies offering these products, if not create them themselves.

Bryan Yurcan is associate editor for Bank Systems and Technology. He has worked in various editorial capacities for newspapers and magazines for the past 8 years. After beginning his career as a municipal and courts reporter for daily newspapers in upstate New York, Bryan has ... View Full Bio