Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Only about one-third of PayPal’s accounts get paid with credit cards, and Wall Street analysts figure PayPal will swallow the charge. PayPal’s card network, Discover (NYSE:DFS), says it won’t mimic MasterCard’s new charge. Visa (NYSE:V) and American Express (NYSE:AXP) are noncommittal. And exactly how Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Apple (which uses a PayPal-like “staged” arrangement for purchases from its own stores through iTunes accounts) will deal with this remains unknown.

And then there’s MCX. No, it doesn’t exist yet. But it’s being designed specifically for the twin purposes of cutting interchange costs and letting chains keep control of CRM data. That makes it the blood-enemy of card brands.

If MasterCard’s SDWOANAF is supposed to nudge third-party wallets toward more transaction-data sharing, that’s something wallet operators might be able to work with because they have cards in the loop anyway. It’s really just a technical challenge. Apparently “asking nicely” isn’t in the Card Brand Official Playbook.

There’s an irony here: Google Wallet, which signed up MasterCard as its first card brand, tried storing card numbers on phones, the way MasterCard and the banks prefer. But banks were so slow to provision their cards to the phones—we’re talking weeks here—that Google finally gave up and went cloud-based. Now MasterCard is slapping Google with a fee for working around the issuers’ foot-dragging.)

But MCX is the anti-card. It’s only going to be really worthwhile for chains if customers pay directly from bank accounts, either with debit or ACH. MCX wants to cut out credit-card transactions and their effectively unlimited interchange.

Until now, the biggest reason for large chains to have misgivings about MCX was Walmart (NYSE:WMT)—every other chain’s biggest competitor and MCX’s biggest backer. It’s still true that MCX is first and foremost about Walmart. Everyone else is along for the not entirely comfortable ride. And of all the big chains that have paid to sign up with MCX, most probably figured it would take something very big to make them feel a lot better about it.

MasterCard may be that very big thing. For the first time, a card brand is making it crystal clear that it really cares about something besides interchange.

Maybe that shouldn’t be so surprising after all. MasterCard’s issuers have their own loyalty programs. They compete for “ownership” of customers. The more CRM data they can collect, the more they can work those customers in profitable ways. And the biggest source issuing banks have for CRM data is what comes by way of the retailer’s POS.

It’s too early to say that CRM data is the new interchange—but we’re now a lot closer.