The mobile payments space - in its various forms - is extremely competitive. Everyone's gunning for market share right now including Square, Stripe, PayPal, Bra

The mobile payments space - in its various forms - is extremely competitive. Everyone's gunning for market share right now including Square, Stripe, PayPal, Braintree, Venmo, Apple, Amazon, Google, merchant processors, the major credit card issuers and banks, etc. There's also multiple layers of credit card processing with various players intertwined with their own interests: http://smg-is714.blogspot.com/2011/11/payment-processing-financial-services.html http://smg-is714.blogspot.com/2011/11/payment-processing-fin.... Right now the fight is for market share. In theory, one of these parties could eventually begin a top-to-bottom integrated system - and that may very well be the end goal for some - but with the world's largest banks, technology companys, and even merchants having a stake at one level or another, it would be extremely hard to do. One could argue that Apple is best positioned to do this: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-apple-has-600-million-accounts-blowing-away-every-other-company-2013-11 http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-apple-has-60... (btw, that's an old stat. Apple by last count had 800MM cc's on file).