Apple might be getting into the mobile payments game, but it is not necessarily through NFC. All signs I see point to Bluetooth LE instead. Yes, it means one more standard to support on top of many variations of NFC for payment systems at first, but Apple is big enough to make that a de facto standard and it has most of the high income customers, so it could become the standard to deploy in countries that has been in a wait-and-see mode with NFC payments systems, such as the US. (Ask Starbucks, if a payment system is coming with the new iPhone, it is the most likely launch partner.) Once there is a critical mass, Asian countries can switch over.

On top of the freedom to ignore NFC variants and avoiding confusion for customers, Bluetooth offers one more big advantage for Apple: BT is already in the phone, so there is no need for new circuitry to take up space that could be used for a bigger battery or a better camera. In addition, I expect Apple to use Bluetooth LE for device discovery and pairing in its “auto-config” peer to peer networking before devices start transferring data between each other through WiFi. Rumors say it is also pushing BT LE for wireless sensors and wearable devices to synchronize.