Financial institutions own the customer’s primary relationship with his money, so patience and persistence should win them the mobile wallet wars, right?

Maybe. In a panel discussion on mobile payment trends at a recent event in the Carlisle & Gallagher Insight Series, attention was called to the carriers, who control something equally important: the customer’s relationship to his mobile phone. Several major carriers have launched a wallet solution, known as ISIS, to limited success.

It might be pointed out that if any industry is less trusted than banking in the eyes of customers, it could well be the mobile carriers.

Cherian Abraham, mobile payments & banking advisor at Experian, pointed out that carriers are interested in getting a piece of the transactions taking place on their networks, but that Microsoft was interested in the same thing in the early days of Internet Explorer. “That happened,” Abraham said, “but it didn’t last long.”

Brent Bowen, Director of Banking Solutions at mobile solutions firm Valid USA, said that banks should be willing to hand interchange revenue over to carriers in return for the rich data carriers have on customers. Together with the information banks already have, this would allow for an extremely rich picture of the customer’s world.

Abraham agreed that partnering with carriers was essential for FIs to secure the customer relationship.

David Schropfer, head of mobile commerce at the Luciano Group and author of several books on mobile wallets, pointed out that trust in the security of smartphones and the medium of mobile payments should be the goal of banks. That way, customers will store multiple payment credentials within the mobile wallet they trust. But, he warned, “Security breaches in mobile banking are coming. Is your bank ready?”

Nonbank players in the wallet space did a great deal of innovating, but may be falling behind. Abraham pointed out that LevelUp is very low on cash, for example. The company has cut staff and switched from a local, door-to-door sales strategy to one of securing national retailers.

Merchant buy-in is essential, the panelists agreed. Merchant rewards are generally believed to be what will make the mobile wallet use case superior to using a piece of plastic. Abraham believes we may be headed, temporarily at least, back to the days of merchant-specific cards — or rather, mobile apps and wallets. The reason is simple — merchants offer rewards that are of tangible value to customers.

It is up to the banks to put a wrapper around these rewards. In a separate presentation, Scott McCormack, CEO of Social Money (maker of SmartyPig), provided a possible window into how FIs could partner with merchants in the context of a savings account. With the goals in SocialMoney, users say that they want to buy, for example, a bike. FIs know this, and can partner with merchants to offer deals to the potential bike-buyer.

The days of waiting for standards and winners in the mobile wallet wars to emerge are over, said Grayson Blair, managing director of Carlisle & Gallagher. “It’s time to place bets and secure customer relationship related to payments or be disrupted.”