Josh Silverman, American Express’ president of consumer products and services, believes efforts to get consumers interested in mobile wallets have so far generally failed.

“On wallets generally, we have had wallets in the market for quite some time, and there has been fairly limited adoption of those wallets. I think ‘fairly limited’ is generous for many of them,” he told an audience at the Barclays Global Financial Services Conference, quoted by American Banker.

The problem, he said, is that swiping payment cards is not seen by most consumers as especially burdensome. “It’s my opinion that the swipe isn’t especially broken,” said the Amex executive.

With consumer enthusiasm less than convincing, argued Silverman, value chain development has been stunted, while different interests among card issuers, merchants and terminal vendors have made it difficult to achieve meaningful collaboration.

“It’s difficult to get any really powerful new value proposition to market unless you can get most, if not all, of those components of the value chain together,” he said.