Google’s Plan to Catch Up with Apple Pay — Softcard?

News broke last week that Softcard, formerly known as Isis, may have a suitor in mobile wallet competitor Google. What would be the price tag, considering the hundreds of millions — perhaps even billions — of dollars telcos poured into Isis/Softcard over the past five years?

Try $50 to $100 million, according to TechCrunch.

Not much, maybe, but this sale will allow the telcos to gracefully step out of the mobile wallet battleground they towered over just a few years back. It could also give Google some needed telco support, something it notably lacked when Google Wallet first went live.

But will it be enough to help Google overtake Apple?

Android does have 60% of the smartphone market, so in terms of mobile payments, there is plenty of room to maneuver, and Apple Pay has moved NFC back to the front of the queue. There is little adoption or customer loyalty to speak of in Softcard, but perhaps the goodwill from the wireless carriers is enough.

Seeking Alpha is more bullish on the union, and mentions PayPal as another potential suitor. Here are the benefits, as outlined by the blog:

• Softcard enjoys the support of American Express and Wells Fargo.
• Google can use Softcard’s patents and existing list of clients and partners to improve its Google Wallet product.
• Softcard is already available in 200,000 merchant locations.
• The point-of-sale network is ready to serve millions of Android phone users.

Experian’s Cherian Abraham, who predicts 2015 payments at Starbucks will be 5x Apple Pay payments during the same period, notes that Google is lousy at integration (in payments) and questions any meaningful tech benefits from the match.

Softcard, curiously, began as a joint venture of GE, Walmart and AT&T, according to Tom Noyes, with Discover and Barclays on board as the network and issue. Walmart jumped ship to begin MCX, which has since hit rough waters. MCX is QR code-based, but has said it is technology-agnostic and will pivot to NFC if needed.

On Twitter, Noyes noted in his typical cryptic, oracular fashion that Google gains “no IP, no People, no platform.. ‘carrier payment relationship’ I’ll write more in 2 months.”

Merchants are always the tripping point in mobile payments — if merchants don’t accept mobile payments, customers will pull out their cards. A recent whitepaper by Austin, Texas-based mobile software providers Malauzai outlines the history of credit cards, tracing their origins to credit extended by merchants in the early 20th century in the form of paper notes or cards for valued customers. Saying that true commerce innovation has to begin at the merchant level is nothing new.

MCX was carrying this banner, but the company is not expected to compete with ApplePay in a significant way. On a smaller scale, LevelUp, which uses QR codes at its POS terminals, has been quietly playing this strategy and has scored wins with quick service restaurants like Argo Tea and Gregory’s Coffee signing on to its platform-agnostic app. Starbucks has shown this is the way to win mobile payments, but has not yet begun rolling out its own long-expected, white-label solution. This has allowed LevelUp to continue gathering morning beverage merchants and quietly work its way into customers’ lives.

And that’s really the name of the game: transactions. When the data is in, which digital wallet provider will have logged the most transactions in 2015? Probably not Softcard, Google or not.