Microsoft Wallet App To Be ‘Retired’ On Feb. 28

Microsoft Wallet app, the company’s cashless mobile payment app, will be discontinued at the end of February, the company said on its website.

“Starting on Feb. 28, 2019, the Microsoft Wallet app will be officially retired,” the company said.

The wallet app let users load debit or credit card info into the app on their phones and tap POS terminals that accepted them for payment.

Although Microsoft has not announced an official replacement, last year, Microsoft announced that it was going to integrate the app with Masterpass by Mastercard. The move helped both companies’ shared goal of optimizing a payment experience for both customers and merchants.

“We are deeply committed to powering a secure and optimized shopping experience that consumers and merchants deserve. Integrating technologies like Microsoft Pay with Masterpass will help the industry move to standards-based payments. Microsoft is a great partner and we will continue to collaborate with Microsoft to make shopping a better experience on all devices,” Raj Dhamodharan, senior vice president of Digital Solutions at Mastercard, said at the time.

In other Microsoft news, the company recently announced that it was taking its digital assistant Cortana in a new direction as it has fallen behind Google Assistant and Alexa in the past year.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, while speaking to a group of journalists earlier this week, said that the hardware giant no longer views Cortana as a direct competitor to Alexa or Google Assistant.

“Cortana needs to be that skill for anybody who’s a Microsoft 365 subscriber,” he said, in reference to Microsoft’s recent push for consumer subscriptions. “You should be able to use it on Google Assistant, you should be able to use it on Alexa, just like how you use our apps on Android and iOS, so that’s at least how we want to think about where it’ll go.”