Is the Era of Plastic Cards coming to an End?
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Is the Era of Plastic Cards coming to an End?
Fremont: There was a time, when people used to carry bundles of cash--the Stone Age, then came the Bronze Age with people carrying loads of cards-credit and debit, and now the Iron Age, where people just have to have a smartphone. So is the era of plastic cards coming to an end? People are opinionated, some agree, some don't. With the growing number of startups in the mobile wallet bandwagon, and the giants also tempted with the technical advances, will the credit cards face a wipeout like it happened to floppies when the CDs came in? Or is it going to provide the credit card companies newer avenues? There are numerous mobile payment options--the premium SMS payments, where the customer sends a payment via an SMS or a USSD to a short code and a premium charge is applied to their phone bills/online wallets; the direct mobile billing, where people use the mobile billing option during their online purchases, get a one-time use PIN, a one-time password and the customer's mobile account is charged for the purchase; mobile WAP, where the consumer web pages or applications installed on his or her phone to make a payment; online wallets like the PayPal or Google Checkout, where the registered users use the PIN sent by the service provider, authenticate it and input their credit card info if required to make the payment. The android era enabled consumers to pay for things by merely authorizing and process transactions in real-time to make the payment. The other version is Square's mobile dongle, which lets the users to swipe their cards on the iPhones and make payments. The latest is the Near Field Communication (NFC), which allows a user to wave to tap a smartphone in front of a scanner or a payment counter to make a payment. With numerous startups and giants jumping on the NFC bandwagon, it won't be late when people start using their smartphones, instead of their credit cards to pay for their purchases. The Google wallet (a new app on the front) is free, and leaves tons of consumer data to the merchant, which can be used to study the consumer behavior. So can we bid farewell to our credit cards? Only time will answer this question, till then it is "hello shopping".