Google’s vice president of payments and wallet has reportedly left the company, following a difficult tenure for the former PayPal executive, who has tried to establish Google’s wallet for payments and offers.

Bedier oversaw the bold launch of the NFC-enabled wallet, in September of 2011 in the U.S., but it has since struggled, facing multiple challenges, including access to smartphones from only one major U.S. carrier and mistrust from merchants, many of which did not trust Google with their data.

A Google spokesman confirmed the move late Wednesday. Bedier’s departure had been anticipated, as NFC Times has reported. And sources had said Bedier at one time was considered for the job as CEO of the MCX merchant group, which plans its own wallet.

Google has been making other changes to the wallet team in recent months. But it remains mute on when it will launch the next major upgrade, which it has referred to as Google Wallet 2.0. Bedier last October promised the new version would launch last November, but Google Wallet 2.0 remains missing in action.

Sources had said the new version would have added a physical magnetic-stripe payment card that Google would issue, accepted on the Discover Network. And there would have been a non-NFC-enabled Google Wallet app for the iPhone.

“Google Wallet’s decision to go with NFC at the point of sale meant it was difficult to scale–in addition to the lack of appropriate POS infrastructure in the U.S., another major challenge was that MNOs (mobile network operators) behind Isis were unwilling to cooperate,” Zilvinas Bareisis, UK-based senior analyst for research and consulting firm Celent, who has studied mobile wallets, told NFC Times. “Furthermore, rightly or wrongly, Google came up against strong suspicions from banks and merchants who were concerned about the technology giant getting so close to the transaction data.” 

He added that while PayPal and Discover have implemented their earlier announced deal that would include a physical card used on the Discover Network, Google has not announced a similar deal, as expected. This might have helped with Google Wallet acceptance.

The change does not mean Google is abandoning the wallet, but it indicates more changes are afoot for the program.

Sources have told NFC Times that the company continues to invest in secure element technology, including requesting vendors to support Global Platform 2.2.1 specifications, which would enable better management of multiple applications on the embedded chip in Google and other Android phones. The chips are in Google's latest devices, the Nexus 4 and Nexus 10, and Google wants to see the chips in other Android devices.

This indicates Google is working on a more open approach to its wallet or other initiatives to expand its reach to the physical world from its base on the Internet. The embedded chips could play host to more services created by third party developers, which could run either inside or outside of the Google Wallet.

In October, Google also quietly secured the wallet PIN to the embedded chip, a developer source told NFC Times. The wallet PIN had been largely unprotected and was the victim of a high-profile hack in early 2012. That hack never compromised the payment applications themselves, but gave Google a black eye in the market, and it had to suspend provisioning of its prepaid card to the wallet until it put a fix is in place.

Bedier Out of View
Bedier has largely been missing from public view since last October at the Money 2020 conference in Las Vegas and was apparently a no-show at the big Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last February.

In Barcelona, Peter Hazlehurst, Google’s director of product management for the wallet, participating in a panel discussion on mobile wallets, noted that Google Wallet is available on 20 NFC devices in the U.S.

Most are sold by Sprint, the No. 3 operator in the U.S. The other three major U.S. telcos, Verizon Wireless, AT&T Mobility and T-Mobile USA have all either blocked or discouraged use of Google Wallet on their NFC devices, many of which contain unused embedded secure elements.

Google has also been unable to significantly add to the list of fewer than 20 retail chains supporting its SingleTap service, which enables users to pay and redeem coupons, rewards or offers at the same time. The merchants did not enable all of their contactless POS terminals to support SingleTap.

Hazlehurst didn’t mention in his presentation in Barcelona when Google would release Google Wallet 2.0. Afterward, he told NFC Times that Google continues to work on the next version of the wallet, with lots of “pilots and testing,” with the goal of enabling any Google user to use the wallet. But he declined to say when version 2.0 would be released.

Bedier had worked more than eight years at PayPal, last serving as vice president for product development for the e-commerce company, when he moved to Google in early 2011. There he took over the wallet program while it was still under development. After some changes, he first introduced the wallet with partners Citibank and MasterCard, putting a Citi credit card application along with a Google-branded prepaid card on the embedded chip in its Nexus phones and other Android models. Both applications supported MasterCard PayPass.

Last August, Google overhauled the architecture to add a cloud-based element. It put an NFC-enabled Google prepaid application on the embedded chip to conduct all of the actual transactions using PayPass, which would then be funded by credit and debit cards users loaded onto Google’s servers.

The arrangement meant that Google would lose money on interchange on each transaction, since it would have to pay higher card-not-present rates for the funding of the transactions.

But Google’s business model for the wallet has remained the same, collecting data to use for sending targeted promotions to consumers. Bedier’s presentations on the wallet, always focused on this theme, referring to Google as an advertising company.

Other Changes to Wallet Team
Google has been making other changes to the wallet team in recent months and the departure of Bedier might mark the start of a larger overhaul of the program.

Gone from the team are Robin Dua, former head of product management for the wallet and Mark Andrews, former product lead for payments. Both have taken up other positions within Google.

Hazlehurst appears to have taken Dua’s job, serving as director of product management for the wallet, since December. He also had served as the point man for the wallet in recent months.

But it’s not clear whether his position has been downgraded. He had served as global head of payments.

The Web giant in March reassigned as many as six staffers from the wallet to jobs in advertising in its Singapore office, NFC Times has learned, a move that does not bode well for any hopes by service providers that Google would launch the wallet in Asia.

Bedier alienated other members of the wallet team after arriving with changes he made to the program, which helped lead to the defections of the co-founding engineers, Rob von Behren and Jonathan Wall.