Digital Lifestyles Reference Guide

Aug 27, 2004

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Digital wallets have actually been around since the late 1990s, even though they weren't widely adopted by consumers at that point in time. In fact, we're now in the third generation of digital wallets—and it's quite likely that the third time is the charm.

The first generation of digital wallets were developed by a variety of entrepreneurial companies during the height of the dot-com boom. These early electronic payment programs didn't fail because they didn't work or weren't needed, but rather because they weren't well publicized. In addition, most of these first-generation programs were offered by small and relatively unknown (at least to the general public) software publishers, and thus didn't have the aura of authority that consumers demand when it comes to dealing with their financial information. These early digital wallets pretty much came and went with little fanfare, sliding into oblivion with the onset of the turn-of-the-millennium dot-com implosion.

The second generation of digital wallets had some big-name backers—in particular, MasterCard, Visa, and other leading banks and lenders. The problem with this generation of digital wallet services is that they were proprietary—MasterCard's e-wallet worked with MasterCard only, Visa's e-Visa worked with Visa only, MBNA's ShopSafe service was only for MBNA customers, and so on. None of these solutions let you store all your credit card information; you had to have a separate program for each of your credit cards. Not very convenient, and ultimately a deal-breaker for this generation of digital wallet technology.

Also riding the second generation wave were a few ambitious online security services, typified by Microsoft .NET Passport. Early versions of Passport not only let you automatically sign into the network of Passport-friendly websites, but also included the Express Purchase option that offered digital wallet functionality. Unfortunately, Passport suffered from the same problem as the bank-specific services; customers were limited to using only those sites that were part of the network. It wasn't a universal solution, so it wasn't used.

Today, the third generation of digital wallets appears to have gotten it right. These new services are actually software programs that reside on your PC, store information from multiple credit cards, and work with virtually any website—just what the customer ordered.

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