When Apple talks about Apple Pay, they talk about Apple products, not MasterCard, Visa or Amex. MasterCard and Visa should be aggressively promoting their own digital wallet brands, “MasterPass” and “Visa Checkout”, and not fawning over Apple Pay. Apple Pay is not going to increase anyone’s payments turnover one iota but is going to cost the acquiring banks 0.15% of those transactions, and for those very big merchants that mostly have the required NFC terminals, that 0.15% probably represents a one-third reduction in the ~0.5% fee that the acquiring bank probably receives and subsequently the share that the issuing bank receives. What is the point? Where is the complement once tokenized MasterPass is available for mobile payments at physical point of sale? Regardless, it’s still easier to pay for a petty value transaction with an EMV card: tap only; no fingers required …

Apple Pay is not a competitor to MasterCard or Visa but it is a cost for the participating banks that still carry the majority of the risk, and a significant cost for those banks servicing very large merchants.

Who cares about iOS; the relatively small group of people carrying a new iPhone 6 would probably prefer to be seen simply tapping their titanium Amex card anyway, and if they can’t find an NFC terminal, well, they can always be seen swiping that same Amex.

Presently, the joke of MasterPass and Visa Checkout appears to be that both MasterCard and Visa are promoting their digital wallets optionally as white-label products for individual banks to then house-brand; the result is a watering down the value of the international MasterCard/Visa brands (the Australian CommBank has named its MasterPass product “CommBank Checkout” and nothing has been heard of it since). That marketing policy is about as nonsensical as it would be to remove the MasterCard and Visa logotypes from their plastic cards; just think how utterly absurd that would be.

Surely, there will be a card present and card-not-present differentiation as long as card numbers are operational and can be manually input; if, and when, card numbers are no longer operational, then it won’t matter anyway; everyone by then will be using an EMV card or, online/mobile, MasterPass or Visa Checkout …

“We want to get to a place where consumers can simply click, touch or tap to make a payment.”

We can do that now with MasterCard/MasterPass or Visa card/Visa Checkout; why involve an intermediary that is invariably costing, to a varying degree, either the participating bank or the merchant? I’m sure the members of the MCX consortium would have very much appreciated getting that 0.15% instead …

Still, it will be nice to eventually see the back of eBay’s clunky “PreyPal” …