Finding the use case that makes everyone want a digital wallet: Samsung Wallet

Rob White, head of identity services at Samsung Wallet, addressed the company’s ongoing quest to accelerate adoption of mobile driver’s licenses (mDL) in an online discussion yesterday hosted by Dock Labs CEO Nick Lambert.

According to Lambert, while mDLs continue to gain traction across the U.S., adoption is still fragmented – and Samsung Wallet wants to change that.

Samsung is one of the three current giants in the biometric digital identity wallet market, alongside Google and Apple. The company has been active in the U.S. market, most recently collaborating with Idemia and the West Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to offer support for that state’s mDL in Samsung Wallet. It now supports digital credentials from six states: Iowa, Arizona, Georgia, Colorado, Maryland and West Virginia.

Samsung among big three wallet providers anchoring strategies to hardware

Like Google and Apple, Samsung’s wallet product is directly tied to its hardware. “The overall goal for Samsung Wallet is to provide great experiences on our devices,” White says. The company wants to make it easy and convenient for users to securely assert their identity,  protect the privacy of their data, and reduce fraud for any relying parties – preferably, on Samsung phones. “Wallet is tied to our hardware.”

White notes that Samsung Wallet will soon be available on its Galaxy watches, with support for digital ID and mDLs. “The goal for Wallet is to be the replacement for your physical wallet, with all the things that we put in there.”

He calls mDL “arguably the most important content” in a wallet, in that it represents a safer way to share identity that offers more user control over exposure of data. “The current protections just aren’t holding up to the flood of fraudulent behavior.”

But in addition to security, there are possibilities for transacting in new ways. “Ultimately, we can see a day where content can be sent in combination – so the idea of maybe sending ID when you make a payment.” Samsung is also developing a P2P payment system that will allow users to send money to friends by simply tapping phones.

That said, when it comes to digital ID and adoption of new technologies, it often all boils down to trust. White compares the current moment to a recent time when mobile payments still felt insecure to many. “It took a while for people to warm up and really get over that security concern.”

White says education is a major element in getting people to trust that digital identity is safe, secure and actually (in theory) more private than a physical card. But delivering that message effectively is not easy – especially when there are lags or gaps on implementation.

He notes that “in the U.S., there’s a big chicken and egg problem,” in that issuers have been slower to move on leveraging digital ID. “The infrastructure’s just not really in place yet. It’s going to come – we’re confident of that. But it’s not there yet.”

Finally, he says lack of law enforcement acceptance is a major hurdle to widespread adoption. He notes that when we carry a wallet to drive, a major part of that is having ID on hand in the case one is stopped by police. If more forces accepted mDL, White says, it could be “a true habit-changing use case.”

But there’s a lot that still has to change, not just logistically, but in terms of basic transactional trust. (What happens if a cop asks for a phone to be held out the window, then it drops on the highway? “It’s a thousand dollar smartphone,” White says.)

He credits early adopter states that have “jumped in head-first,” as well as standards bodies, saying “we’re trying to support those organizations.”

Use cases that make life easier likely to drive adoption

Ultimately, “the most important scenarios are the ones that drive habit-changing adoption.” Digital ID at TSA checkpoints is great, if you’re a regular airline traveler. But not everyone is. And if the idea is to get everyone using mDLs, they have to have a damn good reason to do so. “Old habits die hard,” particularly in the physical world. “We need to focus on the use cases that really make a material difference for the user, make things easier for them. It’s about frequency and impact.”

The answer, then, does not fall easily into any particular vertical or industry or government priority. Rather, adoption will accelerate when wallets find their “killer app” – which is to say, when everyone feels like they need one.

“Me getting a beer quickly at a baseball game is not the most important use case to solving society – but it would get me to adopt the mDL.”

The question remains: if everyone has mDLs, and therefore everyone has wallets, whose wallets do they have?

White says that, “to some extent, we can only move at the pace of the ecosystem – how fast the world around us is moving. There is no one player that does it all.” He acknowledges that there will be other wallets in the larger wallet galaxy. Samsung’s goal in the near future is to enable more state issuing partners for Samsung Wallet.

In the end though, the journey is long. “This is not going to be solved quickly,” says White. “Maybe it’s like what my guitar teacher always tells me. It’s just about making progress.”

Article Topics

consumer adoption  |  digital ID  |  digital wallets  |  Dock  |  mDL (mobile driver's license)  |  Samsung Wallet