Mobile payments has been talked about for a few years now with nothing really coming to fruition, however a lot of people believe that Apple Pay might be the service that gets people on board. I have been reading a little bit about their new service since they announced it a month ago and I'm excited to see how it works. Interestingly enough though I have also seen a number of other companies pop up claiming to be the "modern credit card." Plastic Card, Final, and Coin are three of them and of course you have the mysterious Clinkle that finally launched a product after a ton of bad press. These companies are all making bets on people wanting to keep a physical credit/debit card on their persons as opposed to Apple who wants to eliminate the need to carry them all together.
The big question remains, are they solving that big of a problem? I don't think that Coin and the like are really taking too huge of a leap forward, they're simply consolidating something that isn't a tremendous inconvenience anyways (multiple credit cards in one). That's not to say that mobile payments systems have fared much better in recent years. Is having to take a credit card out of your wallet really that troublesome? For the time being I still have to carry a wallet on me to hold my driver license. Does having to swipe my phone save me enough of a headache to make it exciting? With each of these services I can see bits and pieces of technology that excites me but nothing that comes off as a game changer.
Ultimately I think whoever wins will have to do one thing really well, security. If someone can offer me a new way to make payments that is marginally more convenient and ascetically appealing but is an order of magnitude more secure that's exciting.
I'm reading Zero To One right now and I guess I would ask if any of these services are taking us from 0 to 1 or are we simply moving from 1 to n?