Two dozen retailers, including Walmart and Target, are joining forces to create a mobile payments platform, The Wall Street Journal is reporting.

WSJ quoted “people with direct knowledge of the project.”

The salient points:

The merchants say that they are concerned about potential security and privacy risks in the existing services. They also say that they are better-positioned than the other companies to devise services for their customers.

“What we see out there doesn’t make us very happy,” said one executive who is involved in the merchant venture.

The identity of most of the merchants participating in the retailers’ venture isn’t known, and people with knowledge of the project weren’t specific about how the venture would work. Other details couldn’t be determined, including the name and when such a product will be launched. …

Another participant in the project is Alon Brands Inc., according to people familiar with the situation. Alon operates more than 300 7-Eleven convenience stores in Texas and New Mexico. It also operates gasoline stations under the Fina brand name. …

According to people with direct knowledge of the retailers’ project, merchants say they are not satisfied with the mobile-payment products that have been launched so far, which limit the merchants to providing personalized offers and coupons.

On first blush, our reaction is — damn, it is getting messy out there in payments land. It seems so unlikely that any particular initiative will be able to operate in a vacuum from another. Neither this retailer endeavor, nor Isis, nor Google, nor whomever will have enough reach to achieve a critical mass of adoption. Or at least it doesn’t seem so today. Messy, indeed.

See the full report here.