$ 161 BILLION

What Americans are expected to pay each year, via point-and-tap smartphone payments, by 2022.

The Dream of Your Phone Serving as Your Credit Card

Here’s the thing about mobile wallets: Americans don’t really need them. Plastic cards still work, after all; they’re universally accepted and almost as easy to use as your phone. That may be why, four years after Apple Pay debuted to great fanfare, only about 7 percent of Americans use it, according to eMarketer—and only about 25 percent of smartphone users use mobile payments to buy anything. Compare that with China: 78 percent of smartphone users pay by phone, and WeChat and Alipay have turned sending money into a social activity. These wildly popular apps are backed, respectively, by tech giants Tencent and Alibaba. WeChat, with a billion users, and Alipay, with 500 million, are runaway success stories and pure catnip for Apple, Facebook, Square, PayPal, and all the big banks and smaller startups plumbing American payments. Experts, though, urge patience— a lot of it. As Reetika Grewal, head of payments strategy and solutions at Silicon Valley Bank, puts it: “The thing about financial services is, a lot of things slow-brew.” —M.A.