It seems money is undergoing a bit of a makeover at the moment with social networking features making their way into our bank accounts. What does this mean for our wallets?

The December 2014 marketing video for Apple Pay, an iPhone 6 tool that lets users pay at retail stores using their smartphones rather than cards or cash, featured a familiar narrative. A woman tries to pay for her coffee, but digs around in her bag for her wallet. The digging continues for a painfully long time before she finally comes up with the requisite currency. But! With Apple Pay, she has only to tap her phone to a cash-register terminal, and walk away with her latte. Such is the promise of mobile payments, the catch-all term for platforms that transfer money using portable technology.

The thinking goes that cash and credit cards are old technologies, ripe for disruption. They’re slow, inflexible and resolutely physical. But the problem with mobile wallets like Apple Pay, which try to make your bank account digital, is that they’re just not catching on as some thought they would. Gartner predicts that, by 2017, mobile payments worldwide will reach $721bn, but NFC systems like Apple Pay will make up only 5% of the total value.