[Galaxy Note 4 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] BarryH_GEG:
When I said "dead" I was referring to its future not its current state. Strategically, the financial industry has better options (for them) that don't require feeding customer data back to Google. All Google's initiatives tie back to supporting their advertising driven revenue model. With their customer data collection objective stone walled what reason do they have to get in to electronic payments? The establishment's embracing of Apple Pay comes from their non-intrusive and non-competitive model and that anything they pay in transaction fees to Apple is offset by a reduction in fraud pay-outs. Why do you think Apple Pay's been so well received (B2B) and Google was stone walled? Outside of Isis/Softcard which is blessed by the financial industry because it's non-disruptive, the only other payment initiative with any heft going on is CurrentC ( http://www.nfcworld.com/2014/09/03/...-payments-venture-mcx-unveils-currentc-brand/ ). It's merchant-driven ($3 trillion in revenue generated by its sponsors) with their goal being to blow-up the financial payment status-quo to lower their fees.

So who's going to succeed?

Apple's "God" and has made nice with the financial industry, doesn't hurt merchants, reduces fraud, and delivers a high-value demographic in massive quantities (10M Apple Pay capable devices were sold in three days).

Softcard which is financial industry friendly, open to any credit card issuer to join, and is sponsored by the wireless carriers which control end-user access.

CurrentC which is merchant driven and who, at the end of the day, are more important to credit card issuers than credit card issuers are to them.

Google Wallet which was launched to gather even more relevant customer behavioral data to sell to advertisers and was never embraced by either the financial industry, the wireless carriers, or merchants.

PayPal's mobile strategy seems a mess. I downloaded their app on my phone and Gear and still couldn't figure out how or why I'd want to use it.

Samsung Wallet is the biggest cluster of a piece of s/w I've ever seen. Its been updated a half-dozen times and its UI/UX is still a mess and unless there was a huge incentive I can't imagine using it for anything. I see it going the way of Samsung Music, Video, and Books eventually.

So it's a three horse race in the U.S. - Apple Pay, Softcard, and CurrentC. None will be exclusive and will probably come to co-exist just as Visa, Mastercard, Amex, and Discover co-exist as card issuers. At the end of the day no one will intentionally stand in the way of a customer sale and none of this is important enough to make a customer use or avoid a specific merchant based on their specific acceptance or rejection of one form of electronic payment or another. The next few years should be fun; especially when every payment terminal in the U.S. is being replaced to support chip-and-pen and will probably all be NFC equipped to be future proof. That'll particularly help Softcard which can rapidly build up an audience which, along with Apple's validation of NFC, should attract card issuers and financial institutions that may have been on the fence. It all comes down to who own/controls the audience and infrastructure. Google and Samsung own neither. PayPal has some infrastructure but its non-parallel.