At Fynbos we know that digital wallets will sit at the center of our future digital lives, acting as our agents in everything we do. We believe that, in this future, users must have the freedom to choose a wallet that meets their individual needs, and reflects their personal values.
But this will only be possible if wallets are interoperable with one another, and compete based on the capabilities they have, and the user experience they deliver, not just how easily they can capture users and prevent competition.
Some of the most popular digital wallets today (Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay etc.) have leveraged the reach of their underlying platforms to gain acceptance and wide usage. There are others that have been in the market long enough to have gained a strong foothold but all of them rely on network effects to capture users and keep out their competition.
This is a classic playbook for "winning" the market, but we all know that when there is only a handful of winners, the losers are the end-users like you and me. Without competition to drive innovation, products invariably stagnate, become boring, bloated, and generic. Eventually users have only poor options to choose from and the entrenched network effects make it impossible for new entrants to disrupt the status quo.
As Paul Suwers of TechCrunch points out:
one thing all these various environments have in common is that the incumbent digital wallets, for the most part, don’t play nicely with each other: an Apple Pay die-hard can’t send money to their Google Pay brethren.
Has he been reading our "What is a Payment Pointer?" page 🤔
In the payments world we call the existing wallets "closed-loop" networks. They don't support interoperability and are in a race to "win".
Our goal at Fynbos is to counter this by creating an open-loop wallet ecosystem. An ecosystem where wallets interoperate so their users can seamlessly transact with one another without needing to buy into yet-another-wallet.
We're doing this through the development of our own wallet that follows a set of open standards called Open Payments and the Grant Negotiation and Authorization Protocol that any other wallet could also adopt.
Our goal is to demonstrate that there is a better way to build compelling, safe, and frictionless payment user experiences over any payment rail, and to encourage any other digital wallet, bank or any other payment system to adopt these standards and grow the network with us.
We believe that the Open wallet Foundation will provide essential tools for us all to build these open-loop, and interoperable digital wallets so we're excited to be a part of this global initiative and contributing to this open wallet engine.
We’re looking forward to show-casing what’s possible with payment pointers and Open Payments when our own wallet launches soon (you can join the waitlist here). If you’re a scheme, bank or fintech interested in issuing or accepting payment pointers too, get in touch, let’s work together on a neutral technical standard that creates an open-loop ecosystem.