Sick of lugging
around cash? Don’t worry. The cashless society is just around the corner.
Thanks to smart
… and smarter … cell phones, the days of wallets, cash, even credit cards may
soon be over. Already customers are flashing their phones to purchase lattes in
some Starbucks locations or lumber at Home Depot.
A survey by
Washington-based Pew Research Center asked 1,000 technologists and social
scientists about the wallet’s fate in 2020. Two-thirds felt both cash and
credit cards will have disappeared by then, to be replaced by smart devices. In
fact, even now, smart phones hold all the information we need to transact
business: payment methods and identification.
Naturally, companies are anxious to transition to
the post-cash economy. Both Visa and MasterCard now offer wireless payment
options, and the government of Canada is moving away from plastic, as it plans
to stop issuing social insurance cards in March 2014.
Meanwhile,
Square, Inc. (www.squareup.com) has found a way for small merchants, such as
the local hot dog seller or a dog walker, to accept credit cards via a smart
phone.
The downside, of course, is concern about privacy
and security. The Pew survey found that one-third of respondents felt consumers
would worry about the security of their transactions and the misuse of personal
data, as advertisers will be able to fine-tune their pitches to customers already
predisposed to buy.
