Executives from PayPal recently met to discuss the future of the massive market for retail and restaurant payments with a reporter who then paid for lunch. Without opening his wallet, the reporter entered a four-digit number printed at the bottom of the bill into a PayPal app on his smartphone. An itemised bill appeared on the screen. One click later, without needing to call a waiter, the bill was paid. In recent years, the use of plastic has gradually taken over cash and coins. For all their relative simplicity, credit cards still require busy sales and service staff to take cards bearing a customer’s personal information to special terminals and hand back receipts that need signatures and further processing. For the past decade, payment companies have been trying to figure out how to take advantage of mobile devices to make the process easier and more secure.

A new wave of mobile payments has already begun to gather momentum. At Starbucks, for example, customers can now download the company’s app to their phone, load it with a credit or debit card, then pay at most of the coffee chain’s 11,437 U.S. locations by opening the app and waving their phone under a scanner. The company says more than 11 percent of payments in the U.S. and Canada are now made with mobile devices. Companies interested in reaching mobile shoppers are quickly jumping on board this new development. Apple and Google are working to turn their mobile software into popular one-stop wallets that could usurp Visa and MasterCard as go-to forms of payment at brick-and-mortar stores, generating fees for them instead. Before you know, consumers will be conducting many transactions through phones, without juggling a mass of different apps, a scanner or a photograph of a barcode and in-store checkout transactions will be a thing of the past.

Forgot your wallet? No worries, your phone will do nicely!