The Google Wallet will not work. Here is why.

So Google announced their wallet solution recently and it was a big event. Even people that does not know anything about payments asked me about it. The marketing budget and the ripples created by this announcement won't be replicated easily. Lots have been written about it and many opinions exist about the wallet. One that I particularly enjoyed reading is the following.

Many analysts talk about the relevance and how important this move is for the industry. Others predict that it "might" work or that it could have some impact in payments going forward, but nobody seems to be able to bring themselves to saying the obvious: "this will never work". It will be an expensive exercise by a corporation that can afford it. It will make many claims and rock the industry in many ways, but it will not be used by consumers en mass.

The reason for this is simple. Payments is an eco-system game. Many things must happen at the same time for it to become acceptable and it is actually a very delicate system built on trust. If any of the players in this system withdraws, or don't play according to the laws, then the thing does not work. And the problem with the Google Wallet is that many of the players will not play in this game. They may not say this up-front, but they will not participate in this big Google play. Some of the candidates that I think will not play are the banks (the issuers of the cards), players in the acquiring space (big merchants and merchant aggregation), mobile operators and the most important participant; the consumer.

The players that will play in the Google Wallet space will be the hackers and the fraudsters. Deploying a critical piece of payment software on a hyper-open platform is indeed a bold move.