Barclay's Bank of Great Britain is spending seven figures to advance its goal of a society that doesn't use credit cards at all. The new technology is called contactless payment. Customers use their keychains, their cell phones, their retinas or their fingerprints to pay for purchases or withdraw cash from ATM machines. The ATM machine that uses a fingerprint is already in use in the United Arab Emirates.
Antony Jenkins, chief executive of Barclaycard, said: "It's possible we'll see an end to plastic in the next five to 10 years with new technologies to take its place emerging now. It could turn out to be one of the shortest lived payment methods in history, going from being ubiquitous to a museum piece in the same way as the video cassette."
Barclaycard also aims to have one million customers upgraded to its contactless payment system OnePulse by the end of the year. OnePulse enables people to buy items for less than £10 by touching their card against a sensor, without even having to take it out of their wallet. It can also be used as an Oyster card on London transport.
Barclaycard said people may soon be able to hover their mobile over the price label of an item in a shop, confirm their purchase and take it away without having to go to a checkout or get a receipt.
Mr Jenkins said: "If I had said to you 10 years ago that you couldn't pay with a cheque at the supermarket, you wouldn't have believed me. That is now the reality, and we see plastic cards going the same way eventually."
As avid readers of spy novels -- and the odd James Bond film -- we know how this go wrong. The nefarious villain simply removes the unfortunate victim's eye or finger and uses it to make the cash withdrawal or to get entry into the top-secret facility. We'd rather he just steal our purse, thank you very much. No, no, no, we're not Luddites -- we're all hi-tech girls here. But it just makes us a tiny bit nervous. And what if you want to give your friend your credit card to run into the store to buy something? We suppose you could just hand over your keychain.
No checks. No credit cards. So long as the system never crashes and no crackers break into the financial database, we suppose the future cashless society will work fine. But we just know there will be some horrifying glitches before the whole thing works smoothly.
