Amidst the hype about Apple’s announcements this fall are the reports about its plans to launch a mobile wallet. The prevailing sentiment in the media is what Apple has planned is game-changing and will finally move mobile wallets towards mass adoption. A significant factor in this view is that Apple is actively getting the entrenched payments industry players like Visa on board.

Even though Apple has a history of bringing industries, such as music and Hollywood, along with it, don’t assume the same will be true of payments. Just because my father has an iPhone with an Apple digital wallet doesn’t mean he’s going to use it. There’s still a leap of faith that a large swath of the consuming population needs to be prepared to take and we’re not there yet.

We will continue to see many different approaches, including some that are more true to the traditional card experience. Ultimately, it will be the consumer who will decide how fast the market moves to a digital wallet and that decision will be based on convenience and ease of use.

There are still major hurdles that need to be overcome that no one — even the big players like Google — has cleared. These include hardware and software integration, changing established consumer behavior, re-training retail employees and many more headaches that come along with changing that piece of plastic into 1’s and 0’s. At the end of the day, much of the onus will be on retailers to make consumers feel like plastic is less convenient than a digital wallet.

It’s Not the Transaction

Look at the focus of digital wallet efforts to date. Why get rid of plastic? Is it just to change the form factor so consumers don’t have to carry one more card in their wallet? I don’t think so, because that is focusing on the wrong aspect of the overall experience — the transaction.

The digital wallet has nothing to do with the transaction, but rather with everything that comes before and after that transaction. That’s the benefit of digital that consumers don’t get with plastic. If retailers can create a solution where the plastic card (including the loyalty card), mobile, in-store and online experiences are tethered together, then we’ll have something that is game-changing.

Digital is not going to kill plastic any more than plastic is going to prevent digital. No matter how sophisticated it gets, people want choices and their choices today are different than their choices tomorrow. Those choices will include card-like experiences consumers are comfortable with today.

For example, players Coin, Linkable Networks, and Shift Payments have compelling technology because they enable consumers to have a ubiquitous card. In the case of Linkable Networks, it provides a consumer the ability to take her preferred payment card and register it in some capacity, so that when she uses that card, she can earn rewards or loyalty points across a swath of different retailers without having to manage separate programs. The credit card becomes a loyalty card.

The concept is not dissimilar to Coin, but it’s slicker and easier to manage. Consumers don’t have the issue of battery life, losing the card, or changing security standards. They don’t have to deal with all that technology and are still using something that everyone knows what to do with it. Twitter’s acquisition of CardSpring is interesting because it is technology that allows developers to integrate apps like RetailMeNot with existing plastic cards consumers already own. It’s not adding to their wallet, it’s adding value to the wallet they are already carrying. It breathes new life into an old product.

Another Five Years — or More?

The industry analysts were wrong five years ago when they said that digital wallets will eliminate plastic. That’s clearly not happened, and despite the iWallet, it will take at least another five years before we see any significant pressure on the plastic market. The industry will not work effectively in a short period of time against entrenched behavior. Consumers and brands have been using a plastic card for decades.

To expect consumers to move away from plastic and into the digital medium is, from our own experience providing a mobile wallet, not realistic. We know empirically that successful mobile engagement platforms that incorporate payment, wallet and other functions that are akin to transactions, such as redemption of gift cards or loyalty points, only see about a 10-12 percent uptake in today’s market mix.

At the end of the day, the swipe — the three seconds it takes me to swipe my card — is no less convenient than using a mobile phone to transact. The only benefit to the mobile experience is that I don’t need to carry around the myriad of cards in my wallet.

And what if the phone dies? It’s just as bad as losing my wallet.

Andy O’Dell is co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at CLUTCH.