Everyone and their gran has a mobile payment startup from Square to Paypal to Google to everyone. The logic is why carry your cellphone and wallet when you can just carry the cell and pay for everything. You know what I think about this: it’s a dumb idea.

Why Saul, why are you saying that progress is bad? Don’t you want to just carry one device?

You know what: carrying a credit card isn’t actually that much of a hassle. The truth of the matter is that I need a wallet for my drivers license and various other cards so it’s hardly as though I am going to carry less. Maybe with Apple’s Passbook to control my loyalty type cards I could eventually solve this issue but the truth of the matter is that I don’t care.

I’m not the only one that thinks this:

Bill Ready, CEO of Braintree, which powers the credit-card handling portion of various websites, “is that mobile doesn’t solve a huge pain point for either the consumer or the merchant on in store payments.” In other words, none of these methods makes life that much easier. It’s true that mobile wallets could allow for all kinds of new features, from helping shoppers keep track of their spending to giving retailers new ways to reward loyal customers; but technologies tend to catch on fast only when they solve a pressing problem. Those that merely make life a bit better take time for people to adopt.

A credit card is tiny, it pays for anything around the world and people should spend more time getting parking machines to accept credit cards than a cellphone replacing a slice of plastic with a slab of plastic.

Source (Quartz)