New information Links

Google and the mobile carriers have long been at odds over mobile payments, but faced with the runaway success of Apple Pay, the two rivals have become friends. AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile are selling their mobile wallet joint venture Softcard to Google for an undisclosed amount, Google and Softcard revealed on Monday in separate blog posts , and they have agreed to pre-install Google Wallet on their Android smartphones starting this fall.

That’s quite a full circle to arrive at, considering that for the last three years the three operators  actively blocked Wallet from their devices in blatant protectionism for their own mobile payments service Isis. The problem was that Isis, which changed its name to Softcard last year, was slow to arrive to market , meaning few Android phones had access to any kind of near-field-communications (NFC)–based wallet.

That left the nascent smartphone contactless payment market stillborn in the U.S…