Module 6: Digital Wallets and Mobile Payments

Is a digital wallet a payment method, a card on file, or something else?

The phrase digital wallet covers everything from Apple Pay (a card-network tokenization service) to Alipay (an ecosystem) to PayPal (a closed-loop balance) to Cash App (a peer-to-peer plus card hybrid). Calling all of these wallets hides more than it reveals. This module gives you the taxonomy and the structural differences so you can read any payments deck without getting fooled by the label.

What you'll learn in this module

• The four wallet archetypes (pass-through, stored-value, super-app ecosystem, P2P-plus), the economics of each, and the strategic moves each enables
• How tokenization actually works inside Apple Pay and Google Pay, and what that means for liability and chargebacks
• Why super-app wallets dominate in China and Southeast Asia, why they have failed to ship in the U.S. and Europe, and what that says about distribution
• The interchange and revenue implications when a wallet sits between the merchant and the card, and who is actually getting paid
• How wallet adoption changes fraud patterns, average ticket size, and the leverage merchants have over their acquirers

The full module compares the major global wallets side by side and shows where each fits in the four-party card model and where each rewrites that model entirely.