Microsoft Pay — Microsoft’s answer to Android Pay and Apple Pay that was originally launched in 2016 as Microsoft Wallet — is getting a little more useful today. At Build, Microsoft announced that it will be integrating its digital wallet service into Outlook. This means that, for the first time, when a company sends you an invoice in an email, and you are using Outlook to read it, you can pay that bill directly, without needing to leave Outlook and open a different app or service. Instead, a panel that will open to the right of the main one by way of Microsoft’s Adaptive Cards.
As it launches — Microsoft says it will come first to a limited number of Outlook.com users over the next few weeks, and then more broadly over the next few months — it said that Stripe (using Stripe Connect) and Braintree will be among the payment processors powering the service, and Zuora, FreshBooks, Intuit, Invoice2Go, Sage, Wave, and Xero will be among the billing and invoicing services that will initially be using the feature. In other words, businesses using a combination of these will be able to offer Outlook-using customers the ability to use the feature.