There’s a moment most of us have experienced at least once – you’re at the checkout page of some European online store, you click “Place Order,” and suddenly you’re asked to enter a one-time passcode, confirm your identity on a separate screen, wait for an SMS that’s taking its sweet time to arrive, and somewhere in the middle of all that, you wonder if the item you wanted is still in stock. It’s 2026, and buying something online can still feel like a bureaucratic obstacle course.

Google clearly agrees that this is a problem worth fixing. At Money 20/20 Europe, which took place in Amsterdam this week, the company announced a slate of updates to Google Wallet and Google Pay that are designed to chip away at the friction points that have made digital payments unnecessarily annoying – for both shoppers and the businesses trying to sell to them.

The updates fall into two broad buckets: making digital identity more accessible and privacy-friendly, and making the actual checkout experience faster without sacrificing security. Neither of these is a glamorous pitch, but they’re the kind of foundational improvements that quietly change how millions of people interact with their phones and their money every day.

The digital ID expansion

Google Wallet has been quietly building out its digital ID capabilities for a while now. The idea is straightforward – instead of carrying a physical driver’s license or passport, you store a verified digital version of it in your Wallet. When an app or service needs to check your age or identity, the Wallet shares only what’s necessary, without handing over your entire document.

That “selective disclosure” approach is the key thing to understand here. If you’re trying to prove you’re over 18 to access an age-restricted service, your Wallet doesn’t need to show your name, your address, or your exact date of birth. It just confirms the one fact that matters. Google has confirmed it’s using zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) for this – a cryptographic technique that lets a system verify a claim without learning anything beyond whether the claim is true or false.

This kind of privacy-by-design has been live in the US, Brazil, India, Singapore, and Taiwan. Now Google is bringing it to select European Union member states this summer. The EU is an especially interesting market for this because Europe’s regulatory environment around digital identity is evolving quickly, with frameworks like eIDAS 2.0 pushing for interoperable digital ID wallets across member states. Google stepping in with its own solution – before official EU mandates fully kick in – is a smart move, but it also raises some long-term questions about how proprietary wallet systems will coexist with government-backed ones.

For the age verification piece specifically, Google has partnered with Sparkasse, the German savings bank network with over 300 regional institutions and more than 50 million customers. Sparkasse customers will be able to prove their age through Google Wallet without exposing personal information like their name or birthday – useful for age-restricted content or purchases, and a lot more elegant than what most websites currently ask people to do. Google says this is just the first such partnership, with more issuers expected down the line.

A checkout that actually looks like checkout

The other big announcement is Google Pay direct checkout – and honestly, this one is easier to explain because you’ve probably seen something like it before. If you’ve ever tapped Apple Pay on a website and had the payment complete almost immediately, that’s essentially what Google is going for here.

The way most Google Pay flows have worked until now is that shoppers either tap a GPay button that launches a separate payment sheet, or they rely on autofill to populate card details into a merchant’s form. Both are fine, but neither is as seamless as seeing your saved payment options appear directly as part of the retailer’s checkout page. The new direct checkout changes that – it pulls your Google Wallet credentials into the merchant’s page itself, reducing the number of steps and screens between you and a completed order.

Right now, this is live for select merchants using Airwallex, with Adyen support coming soon. For context, Adyen processes payments for some of the largest retailers and platforms in the world, so when that rollout happens, the reach of this feature expands dramatically. Google says it plans to scale the capability globally with more payment partners.

The security math

One thing Google is being careful about is making sure that speed doesn’t become a cover for cutting corners on security. The announcement at Money 20/20 included a revamped version of its Secure Payment Authentication (SPA) feature, which is aimed squarely at the friction problem described at the top of this piece – those extra steps European shoppers often face after clicking “Place Order.”

The underlying issue is that European regulations require what’s called Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) for online transactions, which is why you get those extra passcode prompts. The goal is fraud prevention, but the implementation has traditionally been clunky. Google’s updated SPA is designed to satisfy those requirements in a smoother way – fewer pop-ups, fewer redirects, but the same level of verification happening behind the scenes.

According to Google’s own testing, the updated SPA cut authentication time by 50% and pushed conversion rates up by 3%. That 3% number might sound small, but for large retailers processing thousands of transactions a day, that translates to meaningful revenue. The feature is rolling out in the UK and Poland with Visa, Checkout.com, Autopay, and Adyen in the coming months.

Why this matters beyond Europe

It’s easy to read these announcements as a Europe-focused story, and in terms of rollout timing, they largely are. But the implications are broader. Digital ID infrastructure, once built and trusted, tends to expand quickly. The same Sparkasse age verification capability that’s launching in Europe could be the blueprint for how Google approaches similar partnerships with financial institutions and issuers globally.

More importantly, these updates reflect Google’s broader positioning of Google Wallet as something much bigger than a card holder. The company wants Wallet to be the secure, central layer for all kinds of credentials – payment cards, yes, but also government IDs, loyalty passes, event tickets, receipts, and age verification tokens. That’s an ambitious vision, and whether it fully materializes depends on trust – both from users who need to feel comfortable storing sensitive identity data with Google, and from regulators who are watching how tech giants handle that responsibility.

For everyday users in the US, the most immediately relevant piece might be the direction of travel rather than any single feature. Google is building toward a world where your phone isn’t just a payment terminal but a verified identity layer – one that knows enough about you to unlock the things you’re entitled to access, without broadcasting any more of your personal information than strictly necessary. That’s a better deal than what most people have today, and it’s quietly becoming real.