This article highlights in simple words, why developed economies seem to be sluggish in taking up mobile payments in spite of everybody and their uncle trying to start that business model: Why Consumers Aren’t Buying the Idea of Mobile Wallets – Yet. The reason is quite simple.

“Part of the reason is that the existing payment methods aren’t broken,” Reibstein says. “If nothing’s broken, there’s less of a compulsion to have to adopt. [The mobile wallet] has got to have some unique and clearly demonstrable advantage before consumers will be flocking to it.”

Taking care of security is clearly not the selling point of mobile wallets. As long as there is no IP firewall as a built in feature of mobile OS configurable and accessible easily to the user (in iOS you have to jailbreak in order to find this feature) and many apps open backdoors to sleazy third parties, there doesn’t seem to be a big incentive in putting payments on your mobile and exposing your bank accounts or other funds to even more risks, including theft and losing access due to batteries being drained.

Still, he is convinced of the concept:

“I think 10 years from now, we’ll look back at it and say, ‘Hasn’t this always been here?’”