I follow a lot of people on twitter (437, since you asked), and most of them are payments or financial technology professionals (or, er, college football writers, but that's not important right now). Today was the busiest day I've ever seen on my twitter feed, because today was the day that APPLE (squee) finally made its long-rumored announcement of its plans to alter the world of payments through its creatively-named "Apple Pay" platform (sorry, iPay was already taken). Apple CEO Tim Cook humbly told the world that "We've created an entirely new payments process."
There are surely some very cool things about Apple Pay, and I can promise you'll I'll be buying an iPhone 6 and adding my airlines reward card as soon as I can. And there were at least a few minor surprises in the announcement, such as the e-commerce functionality and API to encourage third party development. But it is not an "entirely new payments process."
In fact, the remarkable thing about Apple Pay is the extent to which it rides the existing Visa/MasterCard rails, instead of trying to bypass them like MCX (coalition of very large retailers), bitcoin, PayPal, or a variety of other similar new platforms. This is because, despite retailers' dislike (to put it kindly) of the status quo, the existing Visa/MasterCard systems work very well. This is not just because they are ubiquitous for consumers and merchants alike, but also a product of their detailed rules for handling the multitude of problems that can crop up in a payments system (the most obvious being disputes between consumers and merchants).
In general, I think Apple Pay is a strong endorsement of the existing Visa/MasterCard "payments stack". Some are arguing that Apple Pay is a Trojan Horse, designed to have consumers associate Apple with paying for anything and everything, and once consumers are hooked, Apple will "disintermediate" the payment networks in favor of a cheaper solution. That may be true. But for now, the existing card-based structure may no longer always use physical cards, but it's as entrenched as ever.
PS – Just for giggles, I've copied this link to a blog post from Summer 2007 on this topic (so "out of print" I had to find it on archive.org). My basic view on this is (comfortingly or distressingly) unchanged, but the security question (which I'm still not that concerned about) has already come up in two conversations with payments laymen today. This is unsurprising in light of the recent iCloud hack.
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