eftpos Australia CEO Bruce Mansfield believes Australia has reached a "cusp" in regard to progress with mobile payments and this could prompt a dramatic change in the structure of the financial services industry.  However, speaking at CeBIT's Future of Payments Conference in Sydney yesterday, he acknowledged: "This is the twelfth year I've stood in front of an audience saying isn't it great mobile payments are coming."Mansfield nevertheless predicted that over the coming 12 months the pace of change would accelerate and that new players and products would enter the market.Last week, eftpos unveiled its plans to build a new payments hub. This is intended to streamline all forms of payments, including online and mobile.Mansfield said yesterday that the hub, scheduled to go live in 2014, was the first stage of a three-stage plan that would also see eftpos Australia develop capability with regard to chip and contactless card payments, followed by mobile and online payment capability.He did not, however, provide any clue as to how long this would take. In May, eftpos announced plans to begin mobile payment trials. These trials are the result of a five-year agreement signed with mobile-wallet developer C-SAM to create an eftpos-branded wallet that will allow both mobile and contactless payments, and which also has the facility to store loyalty points and receipts. These trials have yet to begin, although Mansfield said that there would be a number of pilots up and running by the end of the year.He warned that the industry had to move on now from trials to full commercial launches of mobile payments platforms. "The lesson from contactless is that until you have ubiquity you don't have acceptance."However, a tweet posted during Mansfield's presentation noted: "Disagree. A mobile payment service needs to be useful first, which will drive ubiquity. Think PayPal." While eftpos continues its slow march toward online and mobile payment capability, other industry players are forging ahead with much grander visions of mobile payment ecosystems.Visa launched its V.me digital wallet in July, and has since signed up a further 15 issuers of payment cards (55 in total) to the program.  Visa's country manager, Vipin Kalra, who also spoke at the CeBIT conference said: "We are trying to build a common infrastructure for provisioning payment data on a mobile device."The company is working with Telstra, Vodafone and Optus along with handset providers, and Kalra said he expected the system would go live in Australia either early next year or possibly late this year. But he noted: "The infrastructure we are building is not just a payments system." He said the devices Visa was creating would be technologically agnostic and could be used for payments (both to make and receive payments), but also, potentially, for transport applications; to store health information securely; for ticketing; to provide secure building access; and to store hotel keys and even airline tickets.He added that although there was a "big war going on about whose wallet is best, from the consumer point of view it's all