A Generalized Digital Wallet Architecture

Abstract

Most existing digital wallet implementations support a single or a limited set of proprietary financial instruments and protocols for electronic commerce transactions, preventing a user from having one consolidated digital wallet to manage all her financial instruments. Efforts to implement extensible digital wallets that are capable of inter-operating with multiple instruments and protocols such as the Java Wallet and the Microsoft Wallet are a step in the right direction, but these wallets have several limitations. In this paper, we propose a new digital wallet architecture that is extensible (can support multiple existing and newly developed instruments and protocols), client-driven (the user initiates all operations, including wallet invocation), symmetric (has common instrument management and protocol management interfaces across commerce applications), and non-web-centric (can be implemented in non-web environments).