Paypal's Digital Wallet - It's Not Just About Replacing Card Swipe With Phone Tap

At the upcoming SXSW event in Austin on the 13th, Paypal will be giving us an insight into what's new in their bag for the consumers. Sam Shrauger, Vice President, Global Product & Experience, PayPal says that it is about a revamped intelligent digital wallet. We don't have the full set of features yet, but what little we got to know from the company's official #-Link-Snipped-# reveals quite something.

<strong></strong>

There is one feature that gives you about a week's time to decide, after you buy and take the goods home, if you want to pay in installments, or switch between your funding sources or even add different sources like gift cards, airline miles, loyalty points, etc. Then the digital wallet lets you devise 'personal lists'. With these lists before going shopping you can search for the things you want and compare the prices within the existing brands and update your lists.

Then you have what Paypal calls the 'Found Money' service. What it does is that, once you are inside a store, the digital wallet will search for deals and coupons for items on your personal lists. Paypal's another feature lets you decide how you spend your paycheck i.e. you can auto create separate sections of your funds for different needs like one for groceries, one for travel, one for entertainment etc. So, you can go to a theatre and when you buy a ticket the payment is automatically processed from the fund that is marked for entertainment.

Well, there might be more in store. Let's wait for SXSW to happen an we'll find out. Take a look at this video of Paypal's ideas regarding the 'future of shopping' from 2011 -

<object width="640" height="360" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="https://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="src" value="https://www.youtube.com/v/V7q1jx8mYi8?version=3&hl=en_US" /><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><embed width="640" height="360" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="https://www.youtube.com/v/V7q1jx8mYi8?version=3&hl=en_US" allowFullScreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" /></object>