Page created: June 9, 2025 | Prior page on this topic: July 9, 2018
A wallet is not a payment device. It is a relationship memory. Every card, credential, and token inside it represents a trust relationship — with a bank, a government, a merchant, an institution. Philip Andreae has been designing how those relationships move from leather to digital since 1996.
This page documents Philip Andreae’s original mobile wallet concept — a prior art record spanning 1996 to the present.
1996 — The Origin
In 1996, while at Europay International, Philip Andreae was permitted to propose the concept of the mobile wallet — the idea that a phone could carry all the credentials, cards, receipts, and digital relationships a person holds in a physical wallet. This was a decade before Apple Pay, fifteen years before NFC payments went mainstream.
The 2010 Wayback Machine archive confirms the presentation was still publicly accessible online at that time — fifteen years after the original concept was formed.
2006 — My Wallet 2: The Device Architecture
From 1996, we jump forward ten years to 2006, when Philip developed My Wallet 2 — a full device and business architecture that turned the mobile wallet concept into a concrete proposal.
The Vision: A 5-Card Brick
The dream was a device that would reduce the contents of your pocket to a 5-card brick — a single piece of hardware capable of replacing every card, credential, and key a person carries. The architecture included:
- A touchscreen on the front face — hardwired directly to the Secure Element housed in the brick (the front face carries no secure element of its own)
- An ePaper screen on the back for low-power credential display
- A high-definition 3D camera
- A fingerprint scanner
- Connectivity: QR, BLE, NFC, WiFi, and 3G/4G (now 5G)
- The ability to communicate credentials, digital signatures, and identity assertions with merchants, issuers, governments, social platforms, and any entity with whom you have a digital relationship
This architecture predates the iPhone (2007), Apple Pay (2014), Google Pay, and every major mobile wallet product that followed.
Original documents from this release (2006, opens in a new tab): 2006 Patent Filing · My Wallet 2 Presentation Deck · With Mobile and the Internet at Our Fingertips.
2009–2010 — CanDo: Ecosystem Expansion
The CanDo initiative extended the My Wallet concept into a broader ecosystem play — connecting the wallet architecture to issuers, merchants, and governments at scale. It represented the business-model layer above the device concept.
Original CanDo documents from this period (2009–2011, opens in a new tab): CanDo Overview Deck (2009) · CanDo Business Plan (2010) · CanDo Corporate Positioning (2011) · The Power of Three.
2018 — Authentication Doctrine
Philip’s 2018 presentations formalized the cryptographic and identity architecture underpinning the wallet concept: the Secure Element, FIDO, NIST 800-63 AAL-3, and multi-factor authentication. These presentations, delivered to financial institutions and standards bodies, represent the technical doctrine that connects the 1996 wallet concept to modern identity frameworks.
Original 2018 presentation materials (opens in a new tab): PUCHE Presentation · Payment Landscape Overview.
2026 — The Digital Wallet Blog: Retrospective Framing
Philip’s May 2026 essay, The Evolution of the Digital Wallet: From Smart Cards to iPhone, synthesizes thirty years of this work — from Europay to EMV to NFC to the modern mobile wallet ecosystem — into a single intellectual arc.
Prior Art Timeline
| Year | Artifact | Significance |
| 1996 | Europay mobile wallet concept | Conceptual origin — the phone as credential carrier |
| 2006–2007 | My Wallet 2 | Device architecture: 5-card brick, SE, ePaper, NFC, biometrics |
| 2009–2010 | CanDo | Ecosystem expansion — issuers, merchants, governments |
| 2018 | Cryptography & Authentication presentations | Technical doctrine: FIDO, Secure Element, NIST 800-63 |
| 2026 | Digital Wallet retrospective essay | Intellectual synthesis of the full arc |
Note: The original presentation materials from each period are linked above, opening in a new tab. The prior art is further documented through the publication dates of the original files, the 2010 Wayback Machine archive, and Philip’s continuous publication on these themes since 1996.
Designing the wallet was only half the problem. The other half was building the ecosystem that could issue into it, transact through it, and anchor identity at scale. That work is documented on the CanDo page.
Philip E. Andreae — Senior Advisor Profile → | Payments Work → | FIDO & Authentication →