Chase announces new QR-based digital wallet service Chase Pay, available mid-2016
Chase Announces Chase Pay, Its Own Digital Wallet — Add Chase to the list of banks creating their own digital wallets to challenge those from Apple, Samsung and Google.
Context & Ripple Effects
Chase is entering a fight it has been circling for weeks: days earlier, Re/code reported that banks were likely the next big competitors for Android Pay and Samsung Pay, with Capital One becoming the first US bank to put tap-to-pay inside its own Android app. Chase Pay is the same thesis at larger scale — a bank-built wallet meant to keep cardholders inside Chase's app rather than Apple's, Samsung's, or Google's.
The timing matters because the rails are shifting underneath the announcement: within weeks of this news, Square began shipping its chip card reader and Samsung Pay added support for Chase cards (Square's reader plus Samsung Pay support), meaning Chase's own cards were already living happily inside rival wallets even as Chase built its alternative.
First-order effects
- Apple, Samsung, and Google gain a direct bank-branded competitor when Chase Pay arrives mid-2016, and Chase gains a lever to steer its massive cardholder base toward its own checkout flow instead of the platform wallets.
Second-order effects
- Merchants and payment partners face a fragmentation tax: accepting Chase Pay alongside Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, and Google Pay means supporting multiple wallet integrations, which strengthens any player who can consolidate acceptance.
Third-order effects
- The pattern this starts — bank wallets struggling against platform wallets — plays out over the following years: J.P. Morgan later shut down the Chase Pay app entirely (shutting down the app while keeping the Chase Pay button) before rejoining the fight through the seven-bank wallet run by Zelle owner Early Warning Services (a consortium wallet managed by Early Warning Services), suggesting banks ultimately compete with tech platforms collectively rather than individually.
The trend: Consumer payments are consolidating around whoever owns the wallet interface, and banks keep trying — solo, then as a consortium — to take that position back from Apple, Google, and Samsung.