Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Choosing from the ISIS telco consortium, Google, PayPal and Apple, whose history suggests the best strength in creating intuitive designs? If we’re going to teach consumers to swim in the waters of mobile payment, Apple’s GUI efforts at least give them the best chance to not drown.

There’s another fact about Apple that could prove crucial. It’s the only likely mobile payment vendor that is also a legitimate national retailer. Although it’s retail store revenue is tiny compared with the Wal-Marts, Targets and Home Depots, Apple is more than just a retailer. It’s easy to make the case that it’s the most cutting edge—and copied—retailer in the U.S. today.

Given that we’re talking about mobile payment, which retailer pioneered in-store mobile payment—and has since had a laundry list of traditional retail chains copying its effort, right down to using Apple hardware.

What about merged channel (the ultimate progression of multi-channel to cross-channel)? A few weeks ago, I was in a local mall and discovered a small glitch in my iPhone. I quickly accessed the Apple site and, in less than a minute, scheduled an appointment (to happen 30 minutes later) with an Apple Genius (tech support) at their store. I walked to the store and the appointment happened right on time.

Think about what that involved. Can you think of any retailer’s mobile app that is to integrated with in-store operations that it could be used to schedule an appointment with an in-store associate? The integration that Apple has created between mobile, online and in-store is nothing short of stunning, when compared with comparable efforts of much larger chains.

Set aside the GUI skills, the consumer popularity and the retail technology leadership and you have one other powerful differentiator: iTunes. Of the major contenders, only PayPal could challenge iTunes for its actual mobile payment transactional expertise and practical experience.

As we’ve argued before, there are a lot of strategic reasons why Apple may not want to engage in hand-to-hand combat on mobile payments and might prefer to cut a deal with someone—quite possibly Google—and simply take a big one-time check plus millions of mid-sized checks for Apple cooperation.

But if Apple opts to make the move—and rumors of an October iPhone announcement that can support mobile payments are true—it would have a lot of compelling arguments to make.