I'm not sure what adoption is like in the US, but in Australia pretty much every single plastic credit card (and Visa/MasterCard debit) supports contactless payments, which is an awesome user experience. You literally just pull out the card and touch it to the machine, and some places it's approved in less than a second.
It only works for payments under $100 (for security reasons) - otherwise you chip and pin.
I don't see CurrenC being able to compete with that, chip and pin, or Apple pay...
I'm not sure how that particular rumour started but it is inaccurate. Some HTC and Sony phones, from personal knowledge, have their NFC antennas embedded above^W [ Edit from evidence: near ] the camera at the 'top' of the phone.
Edit: Here's a page of antenna location diagrams. It looks like we're actually regressing... notice how Samsung used to have the antenna under their logo but now it's part of the battery housing!
http://www.octopus.com.hk/customer-service/checking-your-bal...
... and here's where it is in the iPhone 6, about the same location as the Sony phones
http://images.techtimes.com/data/images/full/12514/iphone-6-...
At the grocery store I shop, people even go to the trouble of entering their phone number to track themselves if they don't have the card, to save a couple of bucks.
Since CurrentC avoids the credit card merchant fees, they can give even steeper discounts to push it.
Which is to say, store discount cards and coupons is basically a solved problem already. Trying to tie that to a payment mechanism just seems futile.
From a user's perspective, the current user experience around credit cards is pretty good. You get a tangible, color coded interface and a tactile interaction mechanism. Swipes work pretty reliably and the time it takes to pull out a credit card is very small.
When you're competing with a solution like this, even minor differences in UX can be dealbreakers. One thing I didn't see much talk about with the iPhone 6 launch was that Apple were the first phone makers (AFAICT) who managed to put NFC on the edge of a device rather than the center. I've tried paying with Google Wallet before and mashing a giant phone against a tiny contactless reader was error prone, frustrating and made you feel like a dork doing it. I tried it 2 or 3 times and then went back to credit cards.
I can't imagine how much worse this CurrentC solution is going to be in real life and how hard it will fail.