Is TargetPay/WalmartPay A Return To Payments Yesteryear?

When word came out last month that Target was preparing its own mobile wallet app called TargetPay, which followed Walmart's confirmed Walmartpay, which itself followed the announcement of ChasePay, it started to feel as though the payments world was de-evolving into an earlier era.

In the days before Visa and MasterCard came to dominance, almost every major retailer had their own payment card (the Macy's card, the Bloomingdale's card). From a customer experience perspective, it became clear that allowing shoppers to pay for everything with just one or two cards would much more effectively encourage plastic purchases. Fast-forward now to mobile payments in 2016. We are now seeing two distinct camps: the one-for-all-and-all-for-one camp featuring Google Pay, Apple Pay, PayPal and potentially even MCX's CurrentC; and the one-for-one group with WalmartPay, TargetPay and Starbucks. (To be precise, Starbucks is a footnote here, given its use of ApplePay.)