This guest post was written by Daniel Thomas, a 25-year strategy and product development veteran of the financial services industry. He is a principal consultant with Mindful Insights LLC.

Google’s announcement two weeks ago certainly raised a few eyebrows in the mobile payments arena and took a giant leap toward putting to rest the debate about the use of NFC.

However, there’s an interesting twist that hasn’t been explored in the many articles written in the aftermath of the announcement. How will Google’s effort impact revenues from the merchant-funded rewards programs (see note 1) banks hope will increase loyalty while softening the blow of the now-certain Durbin Amendment losses?

But has Google just killed banks’ dreams of grabbing a share of the online advertising pie ?

Merchants today are offering higher discounts and rebates to bankcard users because the banks, via various rewards vendors, are letting merchants in on their customers’ spending history.  That data obviously has a lot of value and the merchants compensate the banks for it in the form of commissions on purchases made by the bank’s customers after targeted offers have been presented.  On the surface, one might think that regardless of the mobile wallet used, Google’s or otherwise, so long as the payment is made from a bank-issued product, the bank will still own the spending history data and be able to trade it for a commission.

However, Google, or whoever owns the mobile wallet (but especially Google), will be able to “see” the purchases as they take place and can begin recording its own spending history data.  That, coupled with other non-mobile spend-history gleaned from browsing on the web across multiple cards per individual or household, potentially gives Google a leg up on the richness of its data (assuming Google can tie the two together, is there any doubt?).  Combine that with general browsing history and Google has a pretty good profile of each person to offer up to merchants. 

Privacy issues aside, this seems to trump bank spending history data placing Google in a much better position to bargain with merchants and ad networks. But privacy issues may well loom large over all of this once consumers and Congress put 2 and 2 together and figure out what Big Broth… er, that is, Google is up to.

Meanwhile, not everyone will have an Android phone nor a Google Wallet. Plenty of other mobile wallets will soon hit the scene, but even so it will take a long time for mobile wallets to replace plastic (amusing thought– which will go away first: plastic or the perpetual paper check?) so merchants will still want to keep banks in the equation by compensating them for allowing them to use their spending history to develop targeted offers.

So, merchants are going to need to decide: should they allow Google to make the reward offer or the banks?  Surely, they won’t compensate both for bringing in the same purchase. That leaves the decision in the hands of the consumers. Do they want to receive points and cash back from Google or from their bank? 

Undoubtedly, consumers will decide based on which one offers the greatest value for the least amount of work. Online usability has been a trademark of Google, banks not so much.

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Citibank and MasterCard are key banking partners
On its website, Google asks prospective visitors if they have a Citibank MasterCard

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Note: For more information, see Online Banking Report: Merchant-Funded Rewards (published  Feb. 2011)