Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Problem is, RIM doesn’t quite have all the experience it needs for mobile payments. True, RIM is doing mobile payments in the Middle East. But mobile operator Etisalat and local banks are actually handling the virtual money in those cases. RIM is following their lead.

In the U.S., RIM’s plans got bogged down because it couldn’t cut those types of deals with carriers. In March, The Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. and Canadian mobile carriers AT&T, T-Mobile and Rogers were pushing RIM to put the NFC Secure Element in the phone’s SIM chip (so the carriers would control it), rather than build it into the phone itself (so RIM would control the process).

And although RIM eventually launched a limited NFC-payments trial in New York earlier this year with MasterCard and Bank of America, Google lined up retailers and POS-device partners and plowed past RIM to become, for the moment anyway, the only other vendor with actual mobile-payments experience. Google is also the only player that has built out a mobile-payments network of retailers.

That puts RIM—and retailers—in an odd position. For years, retail IT had to put up with being told what to do by RIM. Now the situation is rotated (though not quite reversed): All those new NFC-equipped POS devices that retailers are installing to support Google Wallet now make up the baseline for NFC mobile payments, and Google will dictate exactly how BlackBerrys will be able to access its payment system. (That’s not actually likely to be a problem, even though RIM rejected a partnership with Google early on, because Google will probably let anyone on board as long as they’ll let Google hand out coupons.)

Or RIM could wait to partner with ISIS or (more intriguingly) Apple, which has a potentially very strong hand in mobile payments, especially now that it held back any NFC activity with last week’s iPhone 4S rollout.

In practice, though, it’s highly unlikely that retailers will accept a second NFC POS device on the counter—and not any more likely that retailers will want to deal with a completely separate suite of back-end software to process mobile payments.

There’s one other possibility: that RIM could create its own closed-loop system in which a BlackBerry behaves like a contactless card from the point of view of the POS, but then tracks each purchase separately through the mobile device to issue coupons or monetize the transactions another way. It wouldn’t even require the active cooperation of retailers.

How likely is that scenario? Not very. RIM already has the phones and the demographically appealing consumers, but RIM has also demonstrated that it’s not going to push ahead on its own. And the path of least resistance between the BlackBerry and mobile payments—for both RIM and retailers—runs right through Google’s Wallet.