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Great post! To your nearly-exhaustive list, let me add this one: 

Beware of Johnny-Come-Lately-Magicians who will attempt to hijack a project midway by claiming that they will deliver whatever functionality top management wants with no cost or time overruns. 

Commonly found on large and high-profile projects, such people are obviously promoting their personal agenda by currying favor with the top management. It's not always easy to sidestep them, but towing their line is quite often a receipe for disaster for the project.

Contactless cards, which use the same underlying RFID technology as NFC, have been around for close to a decade. If merchants haven't found a compelling reason to invest in contactless readers during this period, I'm not sure they'll find one now with NFC-based mobile wallets. 

IMO, the biggest barrier is lack of compelling reason for payers to adopt mobile wallets. All consumer-side benefits of mobile wallets are equally available with the plastic contact and contactless form factor of cards. As for usage, consumers have to take out their smartphones, hope there's enough battery, enter PIN or trace pattern on lockscreen to reach the home screen, locate the mobile wallet app, fire the app, enter mobile wallet PIN, hope that data plan works, select the appropriate card - before they can Tap, Pay and Go. With a plastic card, it's simply open wallet, take out appropriate card, Swipe / Tap, Pay and Go. Therefore, it's highly questionable whether mobile wallets deliver better CX compared to plastic cards.

Interesting idea but I see a few hurdles before it can gain mainstream acceptance: (1) ATMs print on thermal paper which fades away in a few weeks. Okay for transaction slips but not okay for e-cash. We're advised to photocopy such papers if we want to preserve them, but this is obviously not okay for e-cash printouts (2) When I get cash from ATM or merchant, I can count and verify the amount. How do I do that with e-cash? (3) As I've pointed out here, cash is only costly for middlemen like banks and governments. For the two primary players in a transaction, namely, payer and payee, cash is the cheapest MOP. Therefore, e-cash holds no compelling value proposition over cash for the consumer and the merchant (4) Stored Value and Prepaid cards already function more or less the same way as e-cash, so why bother with another form factor?

@BrettK:

I'm not sure if I understand this part too clearly: "if you look at transactions globally using card networks, the majority of those transactions are already 'cardless' through e-commerce and direct debit". If, as you say, they use card networks, how can they be 'cardless'?

IMHO, NFC and QR code based mobile wallets might have a chance of replacing the plastic form factor of cards in the medium term, but they're a long, long way from replacing card accounts and card rails, let alone banking rails. I say this because even Internet based payments, which have been around for almost 15 years, haven't managed to totally / substantially replace card accounts, card or banking rails, barring MNO/Carrier-based billing services like Boku and Zong. Even the poster boys of Internet and mobile payment, PayPal and SQUARE respectively, use banking rails.

@SalilR: TY for your comments. As I'd pointed out in my earlier comment, even granting that the probability of fraud is low, the impact of fraud with general-purpose NFC payments is very high, therefore the risk is far higher than with contactless transit cards, which hold hardly 10-20 GBP. It's interesting that you bring up the topic of traffic volumes. The very fact that contactless cards are used in places that have high traffic - let's ignore (say) South Quay DLR station at (say) 11 PM for the moment - and are constantly under human surveillance actually makes it very difficult for scamsters to skim them, especially when the pickings are hardly 10-20 GBP. It was only after a bit of furore that Google Wallet introduced a PIN, but that was only to start the app, and different from the PIN for individual Chip-and-PIN cards stored inside it. Not sure if GW and the other NFC-based mobile-wallets require PIN for authorizing individual tap-and-go transactions. At least, I haven't seen such a step in any of GW's demo videos.

When Apple had launched Passbook using QR code a few months ago, it seemed clear that it was distancing itself from NFC. Rather than getting diverted by NFC, I actually expected iPhone5 to disrupt the QR code space by either (a) including a scanner app as part of iOS so that the current pain of having to download and install a separate app is eliminated, or (b) going one step further and making this functionality an integral part of the camera app so that scanning a QR code becomes no different from clicking a picture. I'm disappointed that neither has happened!

@AlexP: TY for your comments.

@BrettK: TY for your comments. I'm in agreement with whatever you've said about the safety track record of Octopus card since I've experienced the same with Oyster card. However, this only speaks for the "Probability of Occurrence of Fraud". Risk is also a function of the "Impact of Occurrence of Fraud". Here, as I've said, it doesn't matter if I get slapped with one extra book in my library card. Similarly, with any closed loop transit card, I'm likely to lose a few GBP / HK$ / SG$. So, in both examples, the impact of fraud is negligible. Whereas, in the case of mobile wallets using NFC, it's open-loop, it's a credit or debit card, not a prepaid card like Oyster / Octopus, there's virtually no limit on how large a tab another person in the vicinity can charge to my credit / debit card. So, the impact of fraud is extremely high. Therefore, the overall risk of NFC payment is quite high even if the probability of fraud might be low. Makes me wonder if this is the reason why NFC mobile wallets are still struggling to enter the mainstream despite Octopus and other contactless transit cards having been around for 10+ years.

@FinextraM:

You raise a very valid point when you say, "Add in the fear of unscrupulous employees scanning customer's pockets to pay for their purchases and you've got a difficult proposition to sell." This is one of my fears with NFC payments when I pointed out, "But, having credit and debit card details broadcasted to people and card readers in the close proximity is so not okay" in my recent Finextra post. 

I agree with you that self-service mobile checkout solutions of the type you've mentioned are attractive for consumers. But, I've always wondered if retailers will find them equally attractive. I haven't really understood what prevented consumers from picking up an item, "forgetting" to scan it and walking out of the store without paying for it. Surely these apps can't deactivate EAS tags attached to items the way regular checkout equipment can.

@BrettK:

PayPal allows credit cardholders to pay even without PayPal accounts. SQUARE only supports credit cards. Banks make interchange on all those transactions. Both PayPal and SQUARE use credit cards and existing banking rails. That only supports my point. Superior CX / UX is only an add-on in their case. Examples, if any, of MOPs that have superior CX / UX and bypass credit cards and / or banking rails would be more relevant counterpoints.

In all this CX / UX Kool-Aid, we seem to have forgotten a couple of strong benefits that credit cards have always offered to consumers viz. deferred payment, repudiation / fraud protection and rewards? I don't see why any sensible consumer would opt for a realtime person-to-person payment method that lacks one or more of these benefits, especially in an in-store situation where the consumer doesn't necessarily have prior relationship with the merchant. Compared to these benefits, CX / UX is very peripheral - not that I personally find anything inferior about the CX / UX of handing over my credit card to be swiped.