1.4 billion people in China use WeChat to pay for everything. They don't even bother with credit cards.
Credit card usage has been declining in India.
0% for peer to peer transactions
0% to transfer from your bank account to WeChat
0.001% to transfer from your WeChat to bank account
ewallets are taking over.
Real Standard Oil situation there.
Not that our own duopolies aren't also problematic.
Of course, as a business, you want to be a monopoly.
I can put a $100 bill through the washing machine and it's still perfectly usable. When I can do that with a phone, maybe I'll switch.
I ran a credit card through the washer and dryer last month, and even though it got bent, and the stripe doesn't work anymore, the chip does. And the numbers can be punched into a POS terminal if all else fails.
E-wallets are putting your finances into a single point of failure. Tech people should know better.
This is the -- pretty common -- failure case I worry about. And yes, I know it's also possible for physical wallets to be stolen. But cash doesn't "break" or run low on charge. Software bugs or internet access issues don't cause paying with cash to fail.
Example of stupidity: I can pay for transit in my city with my phone. However, there are newer payment readers on a small percentage of trains here that just don't like my phone, and insist "Invalid Card". The company that manages support for the readers has been unable to help me. The older readers on older trains work fine. The older readers on all the buses work fine. But I have to carry a physical transit card with me all the time anyway, and -- amusingly enough -- it's more convenient to tap the card than to unlock my phone and hope it works.
Main thing stopping this would be that most phone OS doesn't seem to support guest logins, but that is an easy technicality to fix as long as there is demand for it which there will be as phones becomes more important.
A smartwatch would be more convenient than taking out the phone/card.
Actually, multiple single points of failure.
Hell most apps are good enough that people are backing up these things without even realizing it.
And even with backups, you still need to buy a new (minimum $100?) device if yours gets lost, stolen, or broken. Should it really cost $100 to replace a payment card? For many of us here, $100 isn't a big deal, but for a lot of people, that amount determines whether or not they eat this week, or manage to pay rent this month.