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Just to clarify, I was responding to your choice of title, "Think NFC is going to take years?  You're wrong...", which when I saw it, suggested to me that you were arguing against the position taken in the Sybase 365 study (https://www.finextra.com/news/fullstory.aspx?newsitemid=22299) that NFC contactless mobile payments were at least two years away.

Your opening paragraph certainly seems to suggest that you are referring to NFC as a mobile contactless payment application, but then you go on to talk about the iTunes app store, which has nothing to do with NFC.  Compounding the confusion is your response to the NFC skeptics:

"Right now today Apple and Google are working on alternative payment schemes that will circumvent the traditional visa/mastercard POS systems and networks to enable both P2P payments and commercial transactions with merchants and retailers via phones."

This sounds to me like you are saying the lack of contactless-enabled POS terminals doesn't matter because Apple and Google will "circumvent" them.  Fine, but then what is the role of the NFC chip?

I think there is some confusion here between NFC and mobile payments.  Arguing that mobile payments at the POS will happen in the next year is not the same as arguing that NFC will happen in the next year.  Apple and Google (and Square, and Starbucks, and PayPal, and many others too numerous to name) are indeed developing mobile payment systems, but these are not reliant on NFC at the point of sale.  Either they circumvent the POS system altogether or they use 2D barcodes displayed on the handset in combination with optical scanners.

The point that I and others have been making is that introduction of NFC chips on handsets does not mean that NFC will become the dominant mode of mobile payments in the next year, because the POS infrastructure is not there yet.  NFC may be used for short-range communications, like Bluetooth or Bump, or it may be used to enable "smart posters" that activate coupon downloads or other promotions.  It will not, by and large, be used for payments.

The comparison to Apple's creation of the App Store is misleading, because it did not require any hardware upgrades at all.  The entire thing is done in software using the 3G or Wi-Fi networks.  NFC is a completely different proposition, because the merchants have to purchase or upgrade existing terminals.  As anyone who's tried to use their contactless card recently will tell you, even terminals that are supposedly contactless-enabled often do not work properly, because they have not been maintained.  And even if they did work, there's only about 150,000 of them at most, by most estimates.  That is miniscule compared with the 4-5 million terminals in the US.

That's why NFC will not impact payments for several years; it does not, however, mean that banks don't need to worry about mobile.  There are plenty of other ways to use mobile devices in commerce, and banks will want to ensure that they have a piece of the action.  They will not be displaced, as you suggest, but they can certainly be marginalized.

It is certainly understandable that a mainstream media reporter would be confused by all the terminology, but that is all the more reason why those of us in the industry must be careful to be absolutely clear what we mean when we say "mobile payments".