Visa and Mastercard are have begun charging third-party mobile payments providers for their customers, as this insightful post from The Verge documents. The fees will impact players like PayPal and Google, whose “staged wallet” offerings use the smartphone as a kind of bridge between consumers and their credit card accounts at the point of sale.

The move illustrates how cutthroat the nascent mobile payments space is: Carriers, financial institutions, retailers, operating systems providers and transaction companies all want a piece of the pie, which has led to a plethora of competing systems. And as The Verge points out, all those companies want the valuable data that comes with digital transactions as well as a slice of revenues. We’re a long way from seeing a viable business model that rewards all the players in the value chain, and all that fragmentation only serves to confuse consumers and muddy the market. Like I’ve said before, too many cooks are spoiling the mobile payments soup, and the kitchen isn’t going to thin out any time soon.