The history of cash part 5
E-money: the future of cash
We may not be that far away from a world where cash follows the chequebook into oblivion and few transactions are conducted face to face. There are in excess of 20 billion payments of less than £10 made every year; they could all go cashless.
E-money comes in three forms, two of them specifically creations of the internet. First, there is the “card not present” phenomenon, where you have sufficient faith in the online retailer – nowadays, anyone from Tesco to Amazon and lastminute.com – that you feel happy to tap your payment card details on to a web page. You and the “shopkeeper” never actually meet, and you never leave your home or office.
Money thus moves from being a physical commodity – a gold coin, a paper banknote or a plastic card – to being a purely virtual commodity (though of course banks themselves have long held your current account in virtual form, as a series of binary codes in a computer file).
Second, we have seen the growth of outfits specifically set up to facilitate payments on the web. Perhaps the most high-profile of these is PayPal, as featured, and trusted, on eBay. Barclays Bank can chart its origins back to 1685, the Royal Bank of Scotland to 1727 and Lloyds to 1765; PayPal dates back only to 2000, yet it now operates in 103 markets, manages more than 133 million accounts and allows customers to send, receive and hold funds in currencies from the US dollar to the Polish zloty.
The real revolution, though, may be the abolition of cash, cheques, credit cards and debit cards and their replacement by one single means of payment which you just wave, possibly nonchalantly, at the shop assistant. This is what the “contactless” card promises, so called because you don’t even have to put it into a reader to buy something.
The Barclaycard OnePulse card, for example, was launched only a month ago, with 4,000 guinea-pig customers in London. It will combine the functions of an Oyster card (Transport for London’s existing “cashless” method of prepaying for bus and Tube journeys), a Barclaycard, and a “One Touch ” contactless technology card.
This is the novel bit. It allows cardholders to make purchases of £10 or under more quickly and conveniently with a single touch of their card against a reader instead of entering a PIN or signature, thus reducing the need to use and carry cash. In a Bourne-style nightmare, your every move and tiniest purchase will then be tracked by your bank and, if legislation allows, officialdom. Thus can “they” know about your purchase of The Independent, a flapjack and day trip to Tate Modern. Very subversive.
Alternatively, the SIM card in your mobile phone could be used to pay for the little things in life (they’re trying this out in South Korea). Either way, you will be being monitored. Money is what money does, according to the old adage. And in the future, your money may even spy on you.
The first six sections of this article are from Minted: the story of the world’s money by Johnny Acton, published by Think Books on 31 October. To order a copy (free P&P), call Independent Books Direct on 0870 079 8897 or visit www.independentbooksdirect.co.uk
