Anyone even vaguely conscious during Sunday afternoon football games has seen adverts for Visa Checkout, that shopping cart checkout assistant the card network is encouraging everyone—cardholders, issuers, and merchants—to adopt. Visa is not alone. MasterCard’s MasterPass and American Express Checkout are similar product offerings all meant to add convenience and security to the merchant’s checkout flow.

These checkout assistants—you could even stretch the definition a bit and think of them as wallets—use the payment tokenization specification from EMVCo. But as products from competitive networks, each has unique attributes, never mind its own APIs specification.

Glenbrook’s Russ Jones takes us for a pretty deep dive into how these tools work. And the benefits they provide to merchants especially in mobile commerce. Russ has been under the hood and this is a report on what he’s found.