Google Wallet Card

» see google.com/wallet/card as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Ordering one meant handing over the last four digits of a social security number or an ITIN, which settles the question of who could have had one. This card was American at the identity layer rather than at the shipping address. The verification step was the wall, and no amount of interest from anywhere else got around it.

It went up for order on 20 November 2013. A MasterCard debit card issued by The Bancorp Bank, free to request, with no monthly fee and no annual fee, drawing on whatever sat in your Google Wallet Balance. You could hand it to a cashier or pull cash out of an ATM with it. The first ones landed in American mailboxes in the week after Thanksgiving that year.

The reason it existed is duller than the reason anyone remembers Google Wallet at all. Money kept collecting in the balance, some of it refunds and some of it sent by other people. Before the card there was no clean way to get any of it back into the ordinary world. Google had built a wallet that could hold money without letting it move.

~ the case file ~

~ what the card actually was ~

Google was not a bank and the card never pretended otherwise. The Bancorp Bank, a Delaware institution that spends its life issuing plastic under other companies' logos, was the real issuer, and the terms you agreed to were theirs. What Google supplied was the logo on the front, the app that showed the balance, and the decision to charge nothing.

Free was the genuinely unusual part. Prepaid cards in America in 2013 were a fee business built on monthly maintenance charges and on the assumption that the customer had no better option. Google charged none of it and let you activate the card from inside the app instead of through an automated phone line. The whole object was plumbing for a product Google cared about more.

~ the wind-down ~

Google confirmed the end on 31 March 2016, in an email to everyone holding a card. Adding money from a bank account or a debit card stopped on 1 May. On 30 June the cards were canceled along with any recurring transfers set up against them, and Android Pay stopped accepting the card as a funding source the same day.

The reason given was focus. Google Wallet had relaunched in September 2015 as an app for sending money to other people, tap-to-pay had moved to Android Pay after Google I/O that year, and neither of those jobs needed something in a mailbox. The card had been a bridge between a balance and the rest of the economy, and once the balance stopped being the point, the bridge went with it. Two and a half years is a short life even by the standards of this file.

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