TL;DR: is it about some kind of a shift towards smartphone apps as a fundamental consumer payment mechanism? I wish this piece of tech journalism was more info

TL;DR: is it about some kind of a shift towards smartphone apps as a fundamental consumer payment mechanism? I wish this piece of tech journalism was more informative; instead it feels like a lossy rendition of a corporate communique. The stated goals are using a debit version with some merchants and credit with others, getting rid of the number+expiration+CVV scheme. Both require some kind of interactive UI and some kind of interactive communication with the payment infrastructure for authorizing payments remotely. Both requirements are met by smartphone apps, and hard to meet otherwise. What I wonder about is - how is this going to interact with the existing Google Pay/Apple Pay ecosystems, and what are going to be the fallbacks when a phone (or whatever other tech they're using) is not available.