What will your customer call it?

The digital identity industry has settled on the word "wallet" even though the metaphor breaks. That turns out not to matter, because your customer is only ever going to see the agent.

Hi, welcome to the Trusted Agents Situation Room. We're back from our summer breaks, hope yours was great. Each week we help senior leaders in banking, retail and travel make sense of agentic commerce: what's real, what's hype, and what to do about it.

This week we're back in the advisory seat with our clients, where a conversation about wallets got me thinking. The whole industry has settled on a word that no customer is ever going to say out loud. That sounds like a branding problem, but it's closer to a roadmap problem.

Cheers, Gam

The second most difficult thing

"There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things." Phil Karlton, software engineer - Netscape.

I was in a client working group last week where we spent some time considering the implications of a single word. Not the architecture. Not the certification path. Not who pays. The word. Should the thing we are building be called a wallet?

That conversation is a healthy sign. Nobody debates vocabulary while the technology is still in the lab. Words only rise up in priority when somebody has to write the copy that a real customer, or worse, a politician, will read.

After some consideration, I truly believe that wallet is the right technical term but the wrong customer term. That gap isn't a tidying-up job for the brand team later, it is actually an important input for the product managers.

But what’s a wallet you ask?

If you know, you know, so you can skip the next bit.

A digital wallet holds credentials. A credential is a set of claims about you, signed by whoever is entitled to make them. Three roles matter: an issuer creates the credential, a holder keeps it, a verifier asks to see it. Your drivers' licensing agency is the issuer, you’re the holder, and the car rental desk is the verifier.

The claims inside are more granular than the plastic suggests. Turn over a European driving license and you will find the vehicle classes you are entitled to drive, each with its own valid-from date. Those are separate attributes. Unlike the laminated license, a digital credential lets you present one without the rest.

This is being mandated now, which is why the naming question has stopped being academic. Every EU member state has to make a wallet available to every citizen, resident and business by the end of 2026.

That is four months away. Lucyna Janas of Google said recently at Money20/20 that privately-issued credentials from banks are coming to Google Wallet, which means any organisation holding verified data about a customer can become an issuer of it.

Jamie Smith, expert in customer empowerment tech and my co-founder at Trusted Agents, reckons that within three years the only sensible way to move personal data between two parties will be through a wallet. I’ll stand behind this prediction.

Where the leather runs out

If you think about it too hard, the wallet metaphor stops working. And that’s what happened to me.

A physical wallet carries objects, and each object points at something held somewhere else. The card in my pocket is not my money. It is a token that lets a merchant reach into an account at my bank. Handing it over is all or nothing. Everything printed on the card crosses the counter, and if the card is my driving licence that includes my date of birth, my address and my licence number, whether anyone needs them or not.

Digital credentials do not work like that. When a venue needs to know I am old enough to drink, my wallet answers that question and only that question. Yes, over 21. Not the birthday. The verifier gets an answer rather than a document, and I keep a record of what I shared, with whom and when.

So the digital version carries less and decides more. A pouch holds things. This thing answers questions about you and declines the ones you did not authorize. That is a lot of work for a word whose main association is the shape it wears into the back pocket of a pair of jeans.

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Everyone chose wallet anyway

The industry has already run this argument: Apple called it Passbook, then renamed it Wallet in 2015; Google went from Google Wallet to Android Pay to Google Pay and back to Google Wallet; and Samsung folded Samsung Pay and Samsung Pass into Samsung Wallet in 2022. Pay was too narrow once tickets arrived and pass was too narrow once payments did.

There’s other stories too: India has DigiLocker; Vault, locker, store and profile come up in every one of these discussions. Although Tim Berners-Lee's Solid project calls the personal data store a Pod, his company Inrupt, went with data wallet.

Wallet is a bridge word. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone he described three things the audience already owned: an iPod, a phone, and an internet communications device. That got everyone across the gap. Nobody describes an iPhone that way now. Bridge words do their job and then get left behind.

The word does not have to win

Does anyone say "let me go into my wallet"? The fact that you pay is the important thing, the container itself does nothing anybody would pay for.

In the meeting we mentioned the use case where somebody moving house is given a smart data wallet for the property. Useful it may be, but it’s about as interesting as a manilla folder. Necessary, passive, and nothing a customer will ever thank you for. But an AI agent that exists to assist your house search, purchase and moving will need somewhere to store everything securely and to be able to share things as it goes through the process. That somewhere is the wallet, but is it yours or does it belong to the agent that manages your house move?

Which is why the naming argument is smaller than it looks. The wallet does not have to win the customer conversation, because that conversation is going to belong to the agent. Here’s a little more on the agent wallet.

The Trusted Agent Triangle sets out what an agent acting for a customer needs. The wallet is where all three come from.

Identity. Financial services already run Know Your Customer. Agents create the same obligation one step out, Know Your Agent. Which agent is this, who does it represent, and which accountable entity is answerable if it gets something wrong?

Preferences. An agent doing real work needs real information. A shopping agent needs clothing sizes and a ship-to address. A travel agent needs an accessibility requirement and a passport expiry date. Strip that context out and the agent produces plausible rubbish at speed.

Delegation. Somebody needs traceability. Who delegated, were they themselves authorised to delegate, and is there a record of the intents, both the task intent and the intent to purchase and pay?

None of this appears in the retail store. I bought a jacket, paid by card, and whether that card lives in leather or an old sock is of no concern to the retailer. The wallet’s the same. It supplies the proof, the context and the audit trail, then stays out of sight.

Two judgement calls

The first is naming the plumbing on the front of the shop. Call it a passenger wallet and you inherit every association Apple and Google have already built, and your customer starts wondering which wallet you mean and whether they need another app.

The second is harder. Selective disclosure is a real privacy gain, but only for a customer who understands what they have just disclosed. Think about the person with no smartphone, the couple sharing one handset, the man who borrows his daughter's phone, or the customer whose entire experience of consent is clicking accept on a cookie banner. If your credential journey has no route for them, you have built a service that excludes the people who already find you hardest to deal with.

Four things for the agentic roadmap

1. Work out which roles you occupy. Issuer, verifier, relying party. Most organisations are two of the three, and each carries different obligations.
2. Keep the word out of customer-facing copy and name the outcome instead. Use wallet internally, because that is what the engineers, the standards and the auditors call it.
3. For each step in a journey, write down the minimum proof you need rather than the data you would like to hold. That list is the start of your credential specification.
4. Decide where the delegation record lives when an agent acts for your customer, and who can read it when there is a dispute.

Two questions for your leadership team. If our customer never sees the word wallet, what is the name of the thing they do see, and who owns it? And when an agent buys from us for a customer we have never met, what do we need to see before we accept the order?

Nobody files anything

Nobody is going to maintain a digital wallet, bank accounts and taxes are enough for most of us. But an agent working through a house purchase, an insurance claim or a trip will ask for a document, use it and keep it, because keeping it is how it does the next task. The contents get curated as a by-product of the work, which is the only way a wallet stays current.

So in my mind, the wallet is the enabler but the agent is the product. An agent without a wallet is a plausible stranger. An agent with a wallet can prove who it acts for, stay inside the limits somebody set, and leave a record behind. Your customer will never mention the digital wallet, in the same way they never mention the leather one. So the word to spend a meeting on is not wallet, it’s whatever your customer will call the agent.

When the customer at checkout is an agent

Before any of this works, a merchant or a bank has to decide whether to trust the agent in front of it. Jamie and I wrote about that with Visa in When AI Agents Act, covering why Know Your Agent becomes a discipline alongside Know Your Customer, and how a delegation record becomes evidence when a customer says "my agent booked this, not me". The European wallet programmes were never built for AI agents. They are the trust rails agentic commerce will run on regardless.

Download the paper here https://thetrustedagents.ai/trust/.

Where Trusted Agents comes in

When Trusted Agents works with clients, those are exactly the questions we put on the table. We put your processes, customer experience, data, and governance on the spot, then build the execution plan needed to address them.

If this conversation has made you think about how you're going to navigate this new world of human and agentic customers and you want to bounce some ideas around, drop us a line.

​The Trusted Agents Ltd.​
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