In the battle for your mobile wallet one company has been noticeably silent: Apple.  Google has its own mobile payment service: Google Wallet, and Microsoft even announced in June that it would be adding a digital wallet service with NFC capabilities to Windows Phone 8 that would store credit card and mobile payment information.  So, where is the world’s favorite fruit company?  In its announcement of iOS6 mobile payments were left off the agenda. The company unveiled Passbook, a service for keeping track of tickets and coupons, but not credit cards.  According to the Wall Street Journal, some Apple engineers fought for mobile payment functionality. However, the decision –- a very intentional one -– to leave mobile payments out of iOS 6 was made anyway.  “Apple is always a comfortable number two,” said Piper Jaffray Analyst Gene Munster to the Wall Street Journal. “They let their competitors do their market research for them.”  Mobile payments are expected to hit $600 billion worldwide by 2016; however, most mainstream consumers are still not adopting them. NFC, the technology that allows you to tap your phone on a surface in order to pay, also isn’t expected to be available in most merchants for another few years.  According to the WSJ, Apple doesn’t want to be the one facilitating mobile credit cards payments when the service isn’t ready, for fear that customers will blame Apple for merchant’s failures during the process. Under that logic, we may not see Apple deploy NFC or mobile payments in the iPhone for some time, and especially not in the upcoming iPhone 5.  What do you think about NFC? Would you like the ability to make payments by taping your iPhone at a point of sale or is the technology still a little too new for your comfort? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Mobile payments are expected to see phenomenal growth over the next four years. By 2016, analysts at Gartner predict they’ll be a $600bn industry annually. The question is whether Apple will get on board.