Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

But Apple will need NFC phones out there testing before customers can use mobile payments—remember, it all has to just work the first time a customer tries it. That means NFC iPhones will have to be available before mobile payments are announced, and when those iPhone users get an iOS upgrade that supports mobile payments, it has to just work.

No wonder it’s taken Apple so long to even dip a toe into mobile payments.

There’s at least one other way Apple could make users’ transition to NFC payments a seamless experience. Suppose Apple buys a card-issuing bank that exists only for the purpose of issuing a Visa or MasterCard number to each iTunes account. (With $100 billion in the bank, Apple can afford to buy a bank.) Then suppose that payment account number was automatically inserted into the NFC Secure Element when Apple finally turned on its mobile payments.

At a tap-to-pay POS, the phone would behave just like a contactless card. But the retailer would receive the number for that Apple payment-card account—which would then go through the processor to the Apple-owned bank, which would immediately pass the charge onto the payment card for the iTunes account, which would go through still another processor to the original card-issuing bank for approval. Then the OK would get passed back up the line.

If the card is denied, the denial gets passed back up the line, and the customer would know why—it’s a problem with the card he gave Apple for iTunes. If the customer contests a charge, that’s actually contesting a charge on iTunes—which Apple will pass back up the line by contesting the charge with the retailer.

And Apple would collect interchange from the retailer and pay it to the customer’s issuing bank—at least in the beginning. That means Apple wouldn’t be making any money from mobile payments, just collecting large quantities of information on its users’ payment-card purchases. And potentially dominating the mobile-payments market, of course. (Any interchange relief for retail chains would only come later—if at all. Remember, this is the same Apple that takes a 30 percent bite from every music, video and E-book purchase its customers make from iTunes.)

Best of all, as a mobile-payments system it just works—largely because nobody is in a position to say no, except customers.

Is this actually what Apple has in mind? Probably not—as simple as it would be for customers and retailers, it still has too many potential points of failure. But that simplicity for customers and retailers is exactly what has proven so hard for mobile payments. There are ways Apple can do it—if customers are interested.

Just don’t expect it to happen until Apple makes sure that’s true.