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I wonder if Apple and others that can generate "soft" credit cards could make this (essentially 1 card per merchant) work pretty easily and seamlessly for consumers. I don't know what underlying infrastructure they have though, are they still heavily dependent on Visa/Mastercard/Amex networks under the hood to do the dirty work or do they have a parallel system?

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Your summoning of Apple is funny because one reason many merchants disabled NFC is because Apple tacked on an additional fee for those purchases.

Apple gets a cut of the intercharge fees that the banks charge (much higher in the US than overseas), but it is not an additional fee to the merchant last I researched.

A lot of the NFC issues were either competing tech, payment networks not being ready, people not understanding their system configuration, _or_ intercharge fees being different for that whole category of fees (not specifically Apple Pay).

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