In reply to Philip Cohen.

You are right about one item. The rails are owned by MC, Visa and AMEX and that is not going to go away. So if one vendor such as Apple wants to play in that space, then they'll need to pay. And dearly.

The adoption of future payment trends is controlled by them
(and subsidized as well) and the next step is this PAN issue to go away. Thus secondary authentication (of some sort) needs to be adopted.

I don't see any third party vendor (Apple, StarB...) going to outfit a merchant (pick one....Sears?) so their "secure" mobile payment is accomplished.

You need 2 items for a mobile payment system to be successful. You own the customer data and you need distribution points. Thus someone like Starbucks owns the data and provides a very limited distribution. It would take a huge amount of funding to branch those payment methods out.