Ariel Bardin (pictured), VP of product management with Google Payments, told an audience that the search giant has no intention of giving up on its slow-growing wallet service or mobile payments more generally, said Cnet.

“We have been doing this for a while,” he said at the Electronic Transactions Association’s Transact 2014 event. “And we’ll continue to keep doing this for a long while.”

Yet the company has had to evolve the wallet from its initial focus on NFC-based payment to take on board cloud-based host card emulation (HCE) technology to store credit card details.

HCE was included in Android 4.4, the latest version of the OS, which opens up NFC to more developers.

“The technology we initially used relied on hardware,” said Bardin. “And there were a bunch of hurdles to get it out the door using that approach. So we asked ourselves if we could emulate the secure element in software, and make it a core service in Android.”