As the digital wallet race unfolds, we're seeing the credit card companies assert themselves with more vigor. Witness the American Express and Visa announcements as of late.

PayPal has basked in the spotlight by default in all this and is the reigning online payments king. To some, it certainly seems as if Amex's Serve and Visa's Digital Wallet validate the approach of PayPal, which is happy to tout a recent survey from GfK that found PayPal is the number one trusted brand in mobile payments, beating out Visa and MasterCard, as well as Nokia and Apple.

So what chance does either Amex or Visa have to compete with PayPal? Both will have to leverage their existing networks and, in the case of Visa, strong ties to banks to overwhelm the online king.

"What's different is that it's Visa. We are not an individual bank," ene executive told Mobile Banker. Even giants like Citi and Wells "didn't have the ubiquity and the scale that we do."

It's unclear what role banks want to play in all of this. Some of them have their own digital payments trials going, and they would no doubt like to be in control of the critical technology and infrastructure that makes all this happen. They do not want to cede that leadership to the card companies or to an upstart.

Of course, PayPal bested several big banks in this arena, vanquishing early attempts by the likes of Citigroup to establish a beach head in online payments.

But Visa faces several challenges here. It reminds me of the old Microsoft mantra "embrace and extend." The card giant aims to embrace the PayPal model but use its market heft and leverage to take it to a new level and add NFC and other extensions.

We'll see how all this plays out. PayPal will not sit still. Neither will Amazon nor Google. It's tempting to see this as an old tech vs. new tech battle. Ultimately, banks will have to decide what they want to market to their customers. 

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