Let’s give it a try and see what future brings to us, this is the phrase many people liked. Before long all of these wallets are likely to end up on mobile phones, which can be used to buy plastic seals in stores and other places. This is where firms such as Square, which has developed its own elegant and easy-to-use mobile wallet and Google, have been focusing plenty of energy. Jennifer Schulz, Visa’s global head of e-commerce, predicts there will be a shake-out that leaves only a few wallet providers standing. Thanks to their trusted brands, big budgets and payments savvy, one or more card companies will be among them.

Card networks are also taking stakes in innovative firms to keep an eye on potentially disruptive technologies. Visa owns part of Square, which recently struck a deal with Starbucks to make its mobile-payment service available in 7,000 of the coffee chain’s outlets in America. So far few have tried to create new payments systems from scratch. Those that have toyed with the idea, such as plastic seals, a consortium of telecoms companies in America, have concluded it is far too costly and painful to deal with regulators, set up anti-fraud systems and so forth.

Fears about the security of new-fangled payment systems also play into the hands of established card firms. Visa and MasterCard were created by banks and are now run by associations with overlapping membership. As a condition for offering their cards, though, banks are restricted from providing alternatives such as plastic seals. This arrangement, the court ruled, is a limitation on competition at the “network level”, if not the issuer level. This has long rankled with the two big rivals to MasterCard and Visa—Morgan Stanley's Discover card and American Express—although it has not stopped either from successfully distributing their products.