BBVA’s digital wallet will be arriving in the United States this summer, along with a slew of new features.
In a presentation at the Mobile Wallet Wars in New York City, BBVA announced a number of new features currently available in European countries that it plans to add to its digital wallet here. Among the new features is a massive redesign, which was unveiled in an update on June 2. The redesign borrows from the aesthetic changes made in Apple’s iOS 7 and closely resembles Simple, the digital bank recently acquired by BBVA for $115 million.
BBVA is also providing customers with a BBVA wallet card, a virtual pre-paid card. The BBVA wallet card will connect to bank accounts, even if they aren’t BBVA’s, to make sure consumers have the necessary funds to complete a payment. The virtual wallet card also comes as a Near Field Communication (NFC) sticker to attach on the back of smartphones (like iPhones) that don’t have an NFC chip. This will help iPhone users become more accustomed to NFC technology and help them make touchless payments. The NFC sticker feature comes as BBVA announced that it would be the first bank to adopt Visa’s new HCE technology, which stores credit card data in the cloud.
The BBVA wallet app also features financing for purchases a bit out of your price range. According to BBVA, the financing process only takes about two steps. The app also features “instant discounts,” where customers will be notified of an offer and have it factored into the transaction immediately.
These features have already been added to the BBVA wallet app, but the app hasn’t yet come to the U.S. According to BBVA, the app is scheduled to arrive in the United States this summer, and to Mexico and Chile later this year. The app, launched in December 2013, has more 200,000 users, with 91% of them considered “active users” by BBVA —a high figure. The new BBVA wallet has gotten rave reviews from customers, leading them to spend four times more at stores where they used the wallet. In addition, BBVA will create an open API so that third-party developers will be able to add the services to their apps as well.
And BBVA isn’t stopping there. In addition to adopting HCE technology, BBVA is working to add some interesting new features throughout the year, including third-party card integrations that would enable non-BBVA account holders to use the app. The Spanish bank also plans to white-label certain parts of the wallet to other companies and will release Commerce360, an app for merchants where they can see transactional data from customers. BBVA used some of Simple’s technology when it created Commerce 360, the bank told Bank Innovation.
The BBVA digital wallet app is stocked with features, but will it help mobile payments take off in the U.S.? We’ll find out when the app comes to the U.S. later this summer.