Trouble is brewing in mobile payments
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Both Apple and Google are heavily involved. Apple's new Apple Pay framework has been developed to allow iPhone users to essentially upload their credit and debit cards to their phone, then select the appropriate card to use when making payments. By waving the phone over a sensor with your finger on the phone’s fingerprint scanner, you validate the charge. Apple stands in the middle, both paying the retailer and debiting your bank account or charging your credit card.
In for a penny, in for a pound, paying for goods and services in this method seems to be the way forward. But in order for mobile payments to happen, everyone needs to work from the same playbook, including the retailers themselves.
Naturally, the retailers don't want to play ball. They are developing their own mobile payment system called CurrentC that would be offered to customers as a smartphone application, allowing the same basic functionality, but delivered in a significantly different way on the back end -- a way that appears to be worryingly insecure.
The upside for retailers in this game is sizable. If they can move their customers over to their payment system, they can essentially shortcut the banks and payment processors, saving a few percent on each purchase made. At scale, that translates into a lot of money staying with the retailer instead of going to a payment processor.
However, it's not feasible for every retailer to produce and maintain their own infrastructure to handle payments like this, so a number of large retailers (including Walmart, Target, and Best Buy) banded together to create CurrentC. With enough large retailers on board, the group hopes to make CurrentC the de facto standard.
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http://www.infoworld.com/article/2840959/data-security/mobile-payments-fraud-opportunities.html