For a handful of pioneers, the mobile payments revolution needn’t wait for questions about hardware to be resolved. Not when so much is possible with software innovations on existing phones.
Most companies agree that embedding a near-field communication chip in mobile phones is the endgame, but it may be a few years before such devices are widely used. There are still questions about who owns the customer relationships, and introducing new phone hardware will take time as well.
Meanwhile, much of the software infrastructure....