How many times have we heard about the paperless society, the cashless society and the death of paper cash?
“Cash died today in Winsted and may eventually die everywhere because it simply didn’t keep up with the modern world.”
--Editorial (following Diners Club experiment in Winsted, Connecticut), Winsted Evening Citizen (March 13, 1963)
“Everybody has talked about the checkless, cashless society. They said it would be here 10 years from now. We think it’s here today.”
--John G. McCoy, chair of City National Bank and Trust, Columbus, Ohio (1973)
Frictionless and easy Account-to-Account (A2A), or Peer-to-Peer or Person-to-Person (P2P) transactions are the goal of many in our industry. I believe we have at disposal, through the work and ideas of my colleagues, practical “baby-step” foundations for a viable cash-replacement mechanism.
I myself have naively dreamed about eliminating cash since I was in school and working on a research project with Ken Callaway. This was when I first manically scribbled (ok, typed – I’m not THAT old!) about what I’ve come to know as extropia in an idealistic manifesto on the virtues of technology and its ability to change the world. (I have to laugh at myself because I was writing about the virtues of touch-tone banking and IVR and what came to be known as MovieFone in 1988.
That was before I owned my any of my own businesses and learned the TRUE value of cash… liquidity, ease of acceptance, assurance (or so I thought), speed, privacy, and ultimately cost and control. It wouldn’t bee too much later that I learned how much the government liked to take, and how difficult is was to be in business and NOT worry about cash flow. In high school, I paid more in taxes than most of my friends made. I quickly became a capitalist republican from a business perspective! :-)
