Almost two-thirds of UK adults now have a mobile wallet set up on their phone. According to UK Finance data, mobile wallet registration reached 65% of UK adults in 2025, up from 57% the year before, with adoption climbing to 89% among 25 to 34 year olds. Contactless payments already account for more than 83% of all UK card transactions. The phone in someone’s hand has quietly become the default place they expect to store the things that used to live in a physical wallet, and loyalty cards, tickets, and coupons are increasingly part of that shift alongside payment cards themselves.
For UK businesses still handing out plastic loyalty cards or paper vouchers, that shift is worth paying attention to. Google Wallet passes are one of the more direct ways to meet customers where they already are, and getting one built is considerably simpler than most businesses assume.
What a Google Wallet pass actually is
A Google Wallet pass is a digital version of something a business would otherwise print or laminate: a loyalty card, a coupon, an event ticket, a membership card, or a boarding pass. It lives inside the Google Wallet app that comes pre-installed on Android devices, sitting alongside the payment cards a customer already stores there. Unlike a payment card, a Google Wallet pass isn’t about moving money. It’s about giving a customer one-tap access to something a business wants to hand them, points balance, a discount code, entry to an event, and giving the business a way to update that information after the fact without reissuing anything.
The practical difference from a plastic card or paper voucher is real. A pass can update itself. If a customer’s points balance changes, a coupon is about to expire, or an event’s gate number moves, the pass reflects that automatically, without the customer doing anything and without the business printing a replacement. Passes can also trigger a lock-screen notification when a customer is near a relevant location, which is something no laminated loyalty card has ever been able to do.
Why this matters more in the UK than it did a few years ago
Google Wallet’s position in the UK market has shifted meaningfully in recent years. Google consolidated its separate Google Pay app into Google Wallet across most markets, including the UK, bringing payment cards, tickets, loyalty passes, and IDs into a single app rather than splitting the experience across two. Google Pay itself already ranks as the second most-used mobile payment method among UK consumers, used by roughly 37% of the population according to consumer research, trailing only Apple Pay and sitting ahead of PayPal. That existing familiarity means most UK Android users already have the app open regularly for payments, which lowers the barrier to also using it for loyalty and ticketing.
The habit-forming effect of that daily use is a genuine advantage for any business issuing wallet passes. A pass that lives inside an app a customer already opens multiple times a week gets seen far more often than a loyalty card sitting in a drawer or a coupon buried in an inbox, and UK Finance’s own data showing 90% of mobile wallet users default to a debit card inside that same wallet only reinforces how central the app has become to everyday UK consumer behaviour.
The two ways to actually build one
There are genuinely two paths to creating a Google Wallet pass, and understanding the difference matters before choosing either.
Building directly with Google’s Wallet API. Google publishes a full developer API for issuing wallet objects, and a business with in-house engineering resources can build passes directly against it. This route offers maximum control over exactly how a pass behaves, but it requires setting up a Google API account, ongoing development and maintenance work, and someone on staff who understands Google’s technical requirements and keeps up with changes to them. For a business without an existing engineering team, this is usually a slower and more expensive route than it first appears, since a pass isn’t a one-time build; it needs updating as loyalty tiers change, promotions launch, or design refreshes happen.
Using a no-code platform built for this specific job. Platforms designed around wallet pass creation handle the API integration, template design, and distribution mechanics on a business’s behalf, which means to Create Google Wallet passes in the UK becomes a matter of using a dashboard rather than writing and maintaining code. This is the route most marketing teams and small-to-mid-sized businesses take, since it removes the dependency on developer time for something that a non-technical team member can otherwise set up and adjust directly.
The right choice depends mostly on scale and existing resources. A large retailer with a dedicated engineering team already maintaining several integrations might reasonably build in-house. Most other UK businesses, including well-known national retail and hospitality brands, get to a working, branded pass considerably faster through a dedicated platform than through a from-scratch API build.
Common use cases UK businesses are actually running
Loyalty and membership programmes. This is the most common starting point. Instead of a customer carrying a stamp card or a plastic loyalty card, a Google Wallet pass shows their current points balance or tier status, updated in real time whenever they make a purchase or reach a milestone. For hospitality, salons, and independent retail specifically, this removes the two most common failure points of a physical card: customers losing it, and staff forgetting to stamp it.
Coupons and time-limited offers. A digital coupon added to a wallet can expire automatically, update its discount value, or disappear entirely once redeemed, none of which a printed voucher can do. Because the pass sits in an app the customer already checks regularly, it also tends to get noticed and used rather than left forgotten in an inbox.
Event tickets. For venues and event organisers, a wallet-based ticket can be scanned at entry the same way a printed ticket would be, while also allowing gate changes, timing updates, or added perks to be pushed to every ticket holder simultaneously without reprinting anything.
Order tracking and post-purchase updates. Some UK retailers use wallet passes to keep customers updated on delivery status after checkout, turning a one-time transaction into a small ongoing touchpoint that keeps the brand visible on a customer’s lock screen through the delivery window.
What to check before choosing a platform
For UK businesses evaluating a wallet pass platform rather than building in-house, a few practical questions are worth asking upfront.
Does it integrate with the systems you already run? A pass platform is only as useful as its ability to plug into the tools a business already uses day to day, whether that’s a Shopify storefront, a CRM, an email marketing tool, or a point-of-sale system used in-store. Most UK POS providers don’t build wallet pass functionality in natively, which means the integration between a POS system and a wallet platform is usually the piece that determines how smoothly staff can scan and update a pass at the till.
Can non-technical staff actually manage it? Since one of the main reasons to use a dedicated platform is avoiding a dependency on developer time, it’s worth confirming that designing a pass, adjusting a loyalty tier, or launching a new promotion can genuinely be done by a marketing team member without submitting a ticket to IT every time something needs to change.
Does it support both Apple Wallet and Google Wallet? Any UK business serving both iPhone and Android customers needs both formats covered, since a solution built for one platform alone leaves out a meaningful share of the customer base. iPhone remains widely used across the UK alongside a substantial Android user base, and a business issuing passes only for one operating system is deliberately excluding the other from the start.
What does it offer for compliance and data handling? Any platform handling customer data on behalf of a UK business needs to be able to speak clearly to how it manages personal data in line with UK data protection requirements, not just quote general privacy language aimed at a different market.
Getting started
For most UK businesses, the practical path looks the same regardless of size: pick one use case to start with, most often loyalty or a promotional coupon, design a branded pass using a template rather than starting from a blank canvas, connect it to whatever system already triggers the moment a pass should be issued, a purchase, a sign-up, a milestone reached, and test the distribution method, SMS, email, QR code, or a web-based “Save to Google Wallet” button, before rolling it out broadly.
The businesses seeing the most value from this shift aren’t necessarily the largest ones. A single-location café replacing a paper stamp card and a national retailer running a multi-tier loyalty programme are solving the same underlying problem: getting a customer to carry something that used to live in a wallet or a drawer, in the one place on their phone they already check without thinking about it. With UK mobile wallet adoption continuing to climb year over year, that place is increasingly where customer engagement actually happens, whether a given business has caught up to it yet or not.
