At airports or malls when you are asked to show your Covid vaccine certificate, you show a photo of it on your phone, and that works. However, have you ever wondered to travel without carrying credit/debit cards or IDs?

At its I/O developer conference, Google has announced that its bringing back the ‘Wallet’ app as a place to manage payment cards, gift cards, rewards cards, passes, and more. Wallet used to be a standalone app before it was folded into Google Pay. Now, the company is making it a separate app again, saying that consumers and companies alike are pushing for digital cards.

The Covid-19 outbreak compelled a majority of the population to make use of the online payment modes whether it is ordering food, medicine or anything else. Hence, the demand for digital modes of payment has been on a rise. The new Google Wallet app will serve multiple purposes, one of them being a place to store bank cards which will enable users to make payments even faster.

All About Google Wallet App

Google Wallet app will be the company’s own digital wallet app that will serve the purpose of storing the digital versions of the physical items that we usually carry around in our wallets.

A Google Wallet can save your bank cards, concert tickets, driving license, vaccination certificates and much more in a digital form. It will let you travel without actually carrying them. In case if you misplace or lose any of these documents, you no longer need to panic as the digital form will be valid. For example, if you lose your debit card or credit card, you do not have to wait for a replacement bank card. You can still use your Google Wallet as it will have a virtual number attached to it. Similarly, you can save your concert tickets or boarding pass in your Wallet and you will be reminded about the same beforehand through a notification on your smartphone.

If you are wondering how your ticket, health cards, driver’s license gets into your digitized wallet, then Google has partnered with hundreds of transit agencies, retailers, ticket providers, health agencies, and airlines so they can create digital versions of their cards or tickets for Google Wallet.

Older versions of Google Wallet had similar aspirations, but Google says other organizations are now more ready to provide users with digital cards and identification to fill the app up. For example, some hotels have shown that they’re willing to provide digital room keys, and some state governments in the US are working on issuing digital driver’s licenses.

What will happen to Google Pay?

Currently, Google Pay is available in 42 markets, Google says. Because in 39 of those markets, Google Pay is still primarily a wallet, those users will simply see the Google Pay app update to the new Google Wallet app. But in the U.S. and Singapore, Google Pay will remain the payments-focused app while the Wallet app will exist in parallel to focus on storing your digital cards. Meanwhile, in India, Google says that “people will continue to use their Google Pay app they are familiar with today.”

“The Google Pay app will be a companion app to the Wallet,” said Arnold Goldberg, the VP and GM of Payments at Google. “Think of [the Google Pay app] as this higher value app that will be a place for you to make payments and manage money, whereas the wallet will really be this container for you to store your payment assets and your non-payment assets.”, he added.

Note – Unlike Pay, Wallet is just going to be on Android to begin with.