Karen - great critical thinking. I agree with your premises. To me, EMV seems like an anvil that's being dropped on merchants' heads irrespective of the cost. At TMS we're small merchant experts and Javelin's emerging information about the pace of adoption is right - it will take a long time for them to understand it and then get on board. And since they respond to whatever consumers want to do, if a consumer pulls out a mag stripe you can be sure they'll oblige.

Big issuers aren't going to rush to mobile payments b/c it's too scary for them to consider Apple or Google or another aggressive Silicon Valley company could potentially stand between them and their cardmembers. They'll mostly be led by the nose. To think of the waste of time and money in the coming years implementing EMV is staggering to me. And with mobile payments potentially being an Card Not Present transaction for the foreseeable future, there's a double whammy down the road unless tokenization and encryption likewise get adopted quickly.

Fun stuff! Keep up the critical analysis.