There's a technological cold war going on in the global payments space. One that has been bobbing along for over 15 years. But the average Joe is unaware of what's going on "behind the scenes". This battle is for market share, a battle between magstripe, EMV, NFC and now virtual wallets. Naive merchants are saying they're just going to have to wait and see who the winner is before making any major plans. The astute merchant says ALL of these technologies (and likely even more) are going to be here for another 20+ years, and they'll need to support them all. That means PoS systems, and online check-out pages, will continue to evolve like a Swiss Army Knife e.g. I can’t wait to see the first spoon, tweezers, tooth pick or saw hanging off a retailers terminal:)
I feel like 90% of the content shared at mobile conferences today is simply marketing hype intended to fluff up one's personal agenda. But nobody is really looking out for the merchant, and nobody is looking out for the consumer, and nobody seems concerned about the impact on our global economy when proposing total gutting of existing infrastructure with simply different technologies that are essentially unnecessary.
