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According to Bloomberg, Apple Pay usage dropped in Year 2 from Year 1. According to PYMNTS.com, Apple Pay is "stuck ... in ... mobile payments purgatory". Still this article calls it a "mobile payments juggernaut".

No prizes for guessing which version Apple is going to like!

When I last checked, Barclaycard had >50% market share of UK credit card market. That should've rightly earned it the label of "UK credit card juggernaut". But it doesn't.

Not a good time to be a bank, I guess.

I totally agree that downtime in electronic payment systems causes pathetic Customer Experience. But to claim that it causes "great damage to an economy" is a major exaggeration. Take India for example: It has a relatively high rate of failed electronic payments and it also the highest growth rate among the world's large economies. When a card payment fails, people switch to cash; when an NEFT payment fails, people switch to card. There's no major damage to the economy. IMO, it's a very fragile economy in the first place if people give up economic activity just because one mode of payment is not available for a few hours. Not for a second am I advocating downtime but it's just that, in my experience, over spec'cing uptime % - Three 9s / Five 9s etc. - on the basis of doomsday predictions of consequences of downtime often multiplies project cost. This in turn renders many projects unviable or, worse, to diversion of part of testing budgets to infrastructure. 

Oh yes, I forgot about the time advantage. An average credit card transaction takes 30-60 seconds depending upon network traffic and sometimes requires more than one attempt if one of the various moving parts in the process is down. On the other hand, an average cash transaction takes 10-20 seconds and doesn't have any dependence on external factors. So, higher discount, zero surcharge, time savings - these are at least three advantages of cash. Nevertheless, I love credit cards, so I'd like merchants to read up all about hidden cost of cash, forego the immediacy of cash payments and throttle the speed of cash payments so that I can use credit cards without suffering any cost or time disadvantages.

Apple/Samsung use Banks/Cards/Schemes. Virtually every form of mobile payment uses bank-issued cards. If Apple/Samsung/mobile win, automatically the undergirding Banks/Cards/Schemes win. But the reverse is not true. So this is an unevenly-positioned debate.

In the long run, we’re all dead anyway. Apart from that, fintech alternatives to cash are currently fueled by VC funding. If they don’t show enough traction, they’ll see their funding cut off. So pace of change is an important element of the debate.

In the light of the following recent findings, there's no guarantee that any one payment method will continuously fall and another, continuously rise, going forward.

1. Nearly half of US Millennials said they're more likely to pay by cash now than a few years ago (https://t.co/pAISFNRJ1O)
2. An overwhelming majority of Indian Millennials said that they prefer cash as their wedding gift instead of gift cards (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/relationships/man-woman/Wedding-gift-dilemma-Just-give-cash-say-young-couples/articleshow/50685204.cms)

To me another really interesting debate is whether regulation will play a far more important role than Apple/Samsung/Mobile in driving the mix of payment methods in future.

@JohnCandido:

True! I wrote my post 2 years ago. I now remember some banker telling me that competitive reasons preclude this feature - apparently receiving bank wouldn't want the name of its customer (i.e. beneficiary) being revealed to the sending bank's portal. I found this objection a bit feeble: (1) The roles could get reversed on the very next transaction, so you win some, you lose some (2) Even otherwise, the bene name could be displayed on a third party website so no competitive info is revealed to either bank.

Another idea that just struck me is why can't account numbers be devised in such a way that an accidental mistyping will only result in a non-existent account number, so payment won't be credited to anyone at all - somewhat like the MOD10 / Luhn algorithm used to devise credit card numbers so that numbers contiguous to a valid CC # are themselves not valid.

This is just one more example where thinking of the customer's journey and reducing friction will help banks improve adoption of ePayments.

Prevention is better than cure! In my post Five Ways to Stimulate Electronic Payments, my #1 suggestion was REALTIME BENEFICIARY CONFIRMATION. "While initiating an NEFT (India's version of ACH payment) or RTGS payment, as soon as the payer enters the beneficiary's bank account details in the fund transfer screen, the Internet Banking portal should provide a confirmation of the name of the beneficiary in realtime. This will assure payers that, when they hit the submit button, their money would reach the right party." I still haven't seen this feature anywhere. Is it so hard to implement?

I know several stores offering a discount of 10% for cash payment and only 8% for credit card payment. I love credit cards. But, given the disincentive from merchants for using them, I always think twice about not using cash. I hope merchants read all these nice reports about hidden cost of cash and advantages of using credit card so that I can forever use credit cards without suffering any cost disadvantage.

"Anyone read Daryl Huff - How to lie with statistics?" Indeed yes! Based on which I wrote:

How To Lie With Big Data

Are Australian banks too cheap to pay the rumored 15-25 bps to Apple for Apple Pay or are they taking Vivek Wadhwa's trojan theory too seriously?

How Apple’s Trojan horse will eat the credit card industry

This is missing the point of how disruptive innovation really works. UBER hasn't become what it is today by waiting to launch until it could foster a warm and cozy feeling between local NYC government and the incumbent NYC taxi medallion system. The ability to leverage regulatory ambiguity is the hallmark of many successful startups. According to legend, Uber's cofounder Travis Kalanick once slipped out from the backdoor of his office when he heard that a couple of San Francisco cops were headed his way to apprehend him for breaking the SF taxi code. This ability comes from fierce ambition and tremendous risk-taking ability. If the Dutch fintech startup ecosystem has that, other things are secondary. If it does not, no amount of regulatory support will help.

It's easy to understand why it's unlikely to work. Your post confirms that by asking why it's taking so long. I nevertheless gave my reasons here. Is that difficult to understand?