The big phone carriers might sell Google their mobile wallet

Remember Softcard (formerly Isis, but renamed for obvious reasons)? It's a joint venture that AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile started in 2010 to get into mobile payments without ceding the market to Google Wallet and Apple Pay. That hasn't quite worked out, since few want to put a $70 case on their iPhone to use mobile payments, and a caselessoption for the iPhone 6 has yet to arrive. Tonight Techcrunch first reported rumors that it's in talks for a sale to Google, while Paypal and Microsoft are apparently interested too. The initial report puts its pricetag at under $100 million, less than the hundreds of millions the mobile carriers invested in it. Google and Softcard have both declined to comment on the rumor, but it seems more a matter of when and who will pick up the pieces, not if.

SOURCE: Techcrunch