Note that Hibernate's implementation of table per subclass requires no discriminator column. Other object/relational mappers use a different implementation of table per subclass which requires a type discriminator column in the superclass table. The approach taken by Hibernate is much more difficult to implement but arguably more correct from a relational point of view. If you would like to use a discriminator column with the table per subclass strategy, you may combine the use of <subclass> and <join>, as follow:

<class name="Payment" table="PAYMENT">
    <id name="id" type="long" column="PAYMENT_ID">
        <generator class="native"/>
    </id>
    <discriminator column="PAYMENT_TYPE" type="string"/>
    <property name="amount" column="AMOUNT"/>
    ...
    <subclass name="CreditCardPayment" discriminator-value="CREDIT">
        <join table="CREDIT_PAYMENT">
            <key column="PAYMENT_ID"/>
            <property name="creditCardType" column="CCTYPE"/>
            ...
        </join>
    </subclass>
    <subclass name="CashPayment" discriminator-value="CASH">
        <join table="CASH_PAYMENT">
            <key column="PAYMENT_ID"/>
            ...
        </join>
    </subclass>
    <subclass name="ChequePayment" discriminator-value="CHEQUE">
        <join table="CHEQUE_PAYMENT" fetch="select">
            <key column="PAYMENT_ID"/>
            ...
        </join>
    </subclass>
</class>

The optional fetch="select" declaration tells Hibernate not to fetch the ChequePayment subclass data using an outer join when querying the superclass.