I am a point of sale technician. I install credit card pin pads for a living. Here are my thoughts...
Google Wallet is doing some things right. There are a lot of players right now that are "trying", to bust into the NFC payment field. You've got everyone from Verizon, Square, Paypal, etc. that are trying to jump on the NFC bandwagon to take over the method that we all use to make payments in retail and hospitality establishments. The reason for this is because there is a lot of money to be made processing payments. Every single time you swipe your credit card through one of those machines people are getting paid. A credit card swipe fee can be anywhere between 20 and 60 cents per transaction. Anybody and everybody is sticking their hand out hoping that you use their "solution".
With that said, a lot of these folks have ideas that while they might be innovative, are unproven and often stupid ideas. I mean, you can get a cash register system that runs on an ipad that processes credit cards through a reader plugged into the headphone jack. Let's just say there's a dozen reasons why that's stupid. Everyone and their mother is coming up with new ways to take your payments.
The point of sale industry is already a robust industry. The major software players in the market have been around for 30 years. Some of the very first applications for computers were to keep track of business' numbers. They have been perfecting their craft for as long as computers have been around basically. The company I work for was founded in 1979.
Specifically with NFC payments, NOBODY wants them yet. Barely any consumers even know what it is. Business owners don't know what NFC payments are, and none of them want these kinds of payments. I've tried selling google wallet NFC enabled pin pads to plenty of business owners and none of them bite. They will bite and start buying into this technology as soon as there's demand for it.
Unfortunately, the best bet I think we have for NFC payments to take hold is Apple. As soon as they put an NFC chip in their phone and any half decent player jumps into the market with a good app *PLUS* a major retail chain fully embraces NFC payment hardware in their stores across the nation.... THEN maybe we'll start to see real adoption happening. Truthfully this is still a ways off.
I see these articles quite often. Every couple months there's a new company popping up promising to revolutionize the way we all pay for stuff at store but the real world is a slow moving giant. There are literally tens of thousands of stores across the country running cash registers on Windows 2000 computers.
Also, IIRC, the way Google Wallet works is that google makes a temporary card number for each transaction that is linked to your account. If that number is ever stolen, it won't work again. This is an important feature of this card and for google wallet as a whole. Google is a huge player in this arena and they've got the tools they need to make things move. It would be outright foolish to dismiss google and their aims in this industry.
One more thought... the google wallet card is a downright wonderful idea and tool for a huge population of poor folk that can't get a bank account and are forced to stupid prepaid cards as an alternative. Stupid cards that have huge fees and are difficult to reload etc.
