Lessons from the Graveyard

Payments has seen its share of bright ideas that didn't make it. Masterpass, Mastercard's early attempt at a universal digital wallet, aimed to deliver frictionless checkout years before Apple Pay and Google Pay got it right. The concept was solid — tokenized payments, faster checkout, brand recognition — but timing and execution were off. Adoption lagged, merchant integration was clunky, and consumers never saw the value. Its spiritual successor, Click to Pay, is now being rolled out to fix those early missteps — a unified wallet experience built on the lessons (and scars) of Masterpass.

And then there's Wirecard — a story every payment professional remembers. What began as Europe's fintech darling imploded into one of the biggest financial scandals in modern history. It wasn't just fraud; it was a case of blind faith in complexity. Regulators, auditors, and even major partners looked away until the illusion collapsed. Wirecard went as far as describing manual Excel adjustments as "AI-powered transaction optimization" — a darkly comic detail that summed up the gap between what they claimed and what was actually happening.

Another entry in the graveyard is Visa's V.me (later known as Visa Checkout), another early digital wallet that never quite found its audience. It was meant to unify card payments online, but by the time it launched, consumers had already moved toward Apple Pay and PayPal, and merchants weren't willing to integrate yet another proprietary flow. It quietly faded and was later folded into what became Click to Pay.

There's also ISIS Wallet, a U.S. telco-led mobile payment effort that launched just before contactless payments went mainstream. Aside from the unfortunate name (they had to rebrand mid-launch), the system was too complex, too fragmented, and quickly outpaced by the simplicity of Apple Pay.

Even the promising Facebook Credits, meant to power digital goods and in-game purchases, couldn't escape the same fate. It seemed like the future — a universal currency for social commerce — until exchange rates, regional regulation, and platform dependency crushed its scalability.

All these failures share a pattern: they weren't short on innovation or ambition, but they overestimated how quickly people and merchants change habits. In payments, timing, simplicity, and trust decide everything. Both innovation and credibility matter — one gets attention, the other keeps it. In payments, if people don't trust the system, they won't use it, no matter how elegant the tech or branding may be.