Patrick Gauthier has been on the job for only five months, but Amazon's vice president of payments already has a lot to say.

Ask him about NFC, the technology used by Apple Pay and Google Wallet to pay by smartphone, and Gauthier launches into a half-hour discussion of how most of the competition is getting payments all wrong.

"I think the industry in general has lost sight of what it is we're here to do," Gauthier told Mashable on Friday.

When credit cards initially became popular, they were a huge step forward for consumers, who previously relied on cash and check. NFC, Gauthier suggested, doesn’t offer the same leap in innovation that the credit card did. After all, is paying with your phone exponentially easier than whipping out a credit card? (Some would argue it is.)

Even worse, Gauthier said, the technology tackles only a sliver of the entire purchase experience: the very tail end. It's the rest of what he calls the "buying experience" that's rife with opportunity.

“Anyone working on NFC is focusing on last century's problem," Gauthier said. "The future of payments is about what happens before checkout."

That's where Gauthier, who previously worked at PayPal and Visa, suggested he will focus. Under the newly minted Amazon executive, the company's eight-year-old Payments unit develops the service called Login and Pay with Amazon, which essentially allows shoppers to pay on third-party websites in one or two clicks with the credit card information stored in their Amazon accounts.

Amazon, which is usually opaque on numbers, did not disclose how many merchants actually use the service in some form, although the four-year-old online clothing site Red Dress Boutique, for example, reports that 20% of all sales — at least $2.8 million based on back-of-the-envelope math — are now processed via Amazon.

We now have @amazon payment gateway at checkout! No more running for the cc ladies! #winning @mcuban — Red Dress Boutique (@ShopRedDress) April 16, 2015

Amazon takes a 2.9% cut from each transaction, plus a variable fee of up to 30 cents.

The company knows it's competing in a crowded space. On the mobile payments side –- a market Forrester research expects will almost triple to $142 billion by 2019 — Amazon faces stiff competition from companies including Apple, Facebook, Google, PayPal and Stripe, among others.

Apple Pay, for instance, may be focused for now on the last part of the buying experience (the transaction), but there's no denying its increasing popularity among merchants and users. Meanwhile Facebook entered the fray this March with a peer-to-peer payments service baked into its standalone Messenger app, a nod from the social network acknowledging how payments is evolving and wending its way into different aspects of day-to-day life, thanks to technology.

To stay competitive with those companies, Gauthier is thinking more holistically. While he would not disclose specific upcoming plans, he referenced examples like Amazon Fresh, which offers an end-to-end experience for grocery delivery: order off Amazon, pay with Amazon and have that produce delivered via Amazon Fresh trucks.

An Amazon Fresh truck in action. Image: Flickr, Atomic Taco

So, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to think that Amazon could partner with, say, local restaurants for online food delivery, provided of course that diners use Amazon Payments to pay. Gauthier also suggested the company might work with brick-and-mortar retailers to create mobile point-of-sale terminals (think Apple Store or Nordstrom).

“Talk to any large retailer, and they’d love to have in-aisle checkout,” as a way for retailers to more effectively capture sales such as impulse or small purchases.

As Payments experiments and rolls out new features, Gauthier said, it’s inevitable shoppers won’t take to some of them.

“Will we succeed all the time? No,” he acknowledged. “But it’s OK to fail.”

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who all but popularized that philosophy, couldn’t have said it better himself.

Updated at 7:40 p.m. ET to include more context of the mobile payments space.