Google Wallet has had a big upgrade to its functionality with company announcing the new version today. It says that it will now support all credit and debit cards from Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover.

The application is now cloud based and Google have said that it brings with it increased security and support for more payment cards. The payment system, which was first released in mid 2011 uses NFC chip inside mobile devices to pay for items. To increase secruit,  the app uses a PIN validation to authorize payment, with Google also recommending that users have a screen lock on the device. If the smartphone is lost or stolen then users will be able to remotely deactivate the Wallet app by logging into an online user area.

Head of product management for the Google Wallet team, Robin Dua, said in a blog post, “To support all credit and debit cards, we changed our technical approach to storing payment cards. The Google Wallet app now stores your payment cards on highly secure Google servers, instead of in the secure storage area on your phone. A wallet ID (virtual card number) is stored in the secure storage area of the phone, and this is used to facilitate transactions at the point of sale. Google instantly charges your selected credit or debit card. This new approach speeds up the integration process for banks so they can add their cards to the Wallet app in just a few weeks.”

While there are few numbers of smartphones with NFC built in and adoption as been slow by consumers and merchants, by making the app more secure and simple it will most certainly increase it usage in the future, especially now that major credits cards are accepted.