Banks are very interested in protecting their bank-client relationship. With Apple Pay, transactional information and credit/debit card numbers are only known by the card-issuing bank and Visa/MC/Amex. For banks, they dislike unnecessary parties being involved. With the way Apple Pay is set up, Apple will not be able to track transactions or know card numbers as a unique token is generated for each card that is added. Only recent transaction information is stored only on the phone, although I'm unsure of the duration. Merchants know there was a transaction, but don't know the actual credit/debit numbers used or even the name of the person.
The current implementation of Google Wallet is only beneficial to Google. He made sure to bring up Google's ability to track transactions as well as their storage of credit/debit card numbers as to why banks dislike Google Wallet. For banks, it's the choice of paying either a certain percentage (I read 0.15%) of all transactions or giving up valuable information about their clients. Not a hard choice to make at all.
Softcard/Isis is a terrible solution as they involve mobile carriers. As history has taught us, they are terrible at providing updates. Their implementations tend to be problematic and against the best interest of consumers such as their app stores and the junk they have placed on phones.
Banks have a massive incentive for customers to use Apple Pay. It looks they were very involved in the Apple Pay design process and worked overtime to make sure they were ready for rollout. They may actually offer rewards or promotions in the future to encourage its use.
Apple Pay required massive infrastructure changes as well as new encryption methods from banks and credit card networks due to the use of tokens. Bank and Visa/MC/Amex employees involved with Apple Pay worked under constant overtime and the utmost security for a year just to prepare. In the US, Apple Pay is a massive change for NFC and anyone who says NFC has already been done is ignorant in assuming it's the same.