CHICAGO — Though panelists talking about the future of mobile payments agreed that bumpy tides would continue, the drivers forcing mobile forward as well as the ultimate end result—with one vision having no device at all—remain varied and blurred.

Calling the rising minimum wage a significant driver, Seth Priebatsch, “chief ninja” at LevelUp, Boston, said retailers will wonder why they are paying employees to be “transcribers,” manually entering information into a machine. “It’ll be about replacing the cashier, not the credit card.”

Speaking before about 400 retailer and payment-solutions providers, Priebatsch was one of six panelists speaking during the final session of the R2 Retail Reinvention conference held in Chicago.

Saying that consumers “must lead” for mobile to become widespread, Will Wang Graylin, co-general manager, for U.K.-based Samsung Pay, said the difference between invention and innovation is that innovation is an invention that solved a problem and got adopted.

Retailers will continue to solve the problem of mobile payments, but in their own unique ways, Graylin said, citing the likes of Starbucks and Uber.

Morphing payments from physical cash and plastic to electronic bits and bytes actually creates a broader advantage of “digitizing credentials,” Graylin said. Authenticating that the person standing at the checkout is actually that person according to digital records can have implications beyond payment, everything from age verification to targeted marketing.

To that point, Jared Schrieber, co-founder and CEO of InfoScout, San Francisco, said as technology progresses, natural evolution will eliminate anything physical: cash, plastic, and yes, even phones. Biometrics in the ApplePay formula hint at more advanced forms of identity verification that may come into play.

Some points of agreement:

• ApplePay’s choice to use near-field communications (NFC) was a strong step towards ubiquity, panelists agreed. The move allowed the “contactless” technology to achieve a high level of acceptance from competing mobile wallets and merchants.
• Consumers have no compelling draw. Panelists agreed that retailers need a compelling reason to break customers’ habits (like using credit cards), especially when the benefits are negligible.
• EMV as a barrier. Europay MasterCard and Visa (EMV) liability shift deadlines have taken priority with retailers, many of whom are still struggling with making the investment.

Organized by Boston-based PYMNTS.com, a payments media and research firm, the two-day conference covered topics including data mining, cyber security and omnichannel marketing.