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institution in a state such as Maryland, for example,
Insider’sreport would offer revolving credit card accounts there and in
nearby jurisdictions, like Washington, D.C. From there,
on payments you graduated up to the big brands: Visa, Mastercard
and American Express. (Discover didn't emerge until the
late 1980s, and for many consumers quickly took over the
stepping stone role of regional cards.)

Eventually, the regional brands were gobbled up by big
Old payment methods banks. The regional card I had, for example, was sold to
Citibank, and just became another Visa card.
don't die, they coexist Debit cards, in the 1980s, were used primarily as cash access
cards. Efforts to encourage debit card usage at merchant
locales, spearheaded by the regional ATM networks,
By Patti Murphy plodded along until the early 1990s, when the card brands
realized there was money to be made on debit interchange.
t's been said before, but it bears repeating: old pay- By 2009, debit cards became the payment method most
ment methods never die, they just move over to preferred by consumers.
make room for new methods of value exchange.
I One only need look at the Federal Reserve's recent In 2021, consumers made 106 billion debit card payments,
payments data: despite the spike in contactless and mobile according to the Fed's data, far outstripping the 51.1 billion
payments during the pandemic, Americans wrote 12 bil- credit card payments consumers made.
lion checks in 2021.
Another big change has been the migration to contactless.
Many, but not all of those checks were written by As Ernest Hemingway once wrote, change happens
businesses, as evidenced by the rising check values. The two ways, gradually and then suddenly. That's how the
average value of check payments rose from $1,908 in 2018 to migration to contactless payments has been occurring.
$2,430 in 2021. (As an aside, I recently asked a 40-something
to "write me a check." Her response was, "Huh? I don't even The number of contactless card payments more than
know if I still have a checkbook.") doubled between 2019 and 2020, from 1.6 billion to 3.7
billion, the Atlanta Fed reported. Mastercard reported that
More recently, the Fed's Diary of Consumer Payment Choice in 2021 that 90 percent of in-person transactions, globally,
found that in 2022, consumers continued to move away took place at contactless-enabled merchants.
from cash and toward credit card payments, a trend that
picked up speed during the pandemic. Yet both on-person Globally, contactless payments have been charting a
and store-of-value cash holdings remained above pre- combined annual growth rate of 20.6 percent, according to
pandemic levels, the Fed said. On-person cash holdings the market research firm Contrive Datum Insights. Globally,
increased by $5 in 2022 to average $73. Store-of-value merchants accepted $1.2 trillion in contactless payments
holdings (for example, cash held at home not for immediate (by customers using cards, phones and wearables) in 2022;
use on purchases) averaged $418. by 2030, the total is expected to reach $5.2 trillion.

"The consistency across these cash data points since the Mastercard estimated that more than half of American
start of the pandemic revealed what may be a new normal adults have used some sort of contactless payment. My
level of cash payments and holdings," Fed researchers preference is for card-based contactless, and I consider it
wrote. Still, there is no question that the payments space an inconvenience when a merchant asks me to insert rather
has changed over the course of my career, and my 20-plus than tap my card.
years writing for The Green Sheet.
Conversational commerce
Credit to debit and back again
Using my phone at the POS is a bit beyond my comfort
Back in the 1970s and 1980s, if you wanted a credit card, level. But recently I learned about a way to use a mobile to
you began by applying for a merchant card. Sears was a pay that's more in keeping with my skill level: text to pay.
large and popular retailer at the time, and securing one After all, who doesn't text? The Pew Research Center found
of its store credit cards was the initial step many young that 97 percent of Americans text at least once a day.
consumers took into the world of buying on credit.
With text to pay, the business sends a payment link by text
The next step was often a regional credit card. (Interstate to their customer, which brings the customer to a secure
banking wasn't a thing back then, although some banks checkout page to complete the transaction.
could branch into adjacent states.) So, a large banking

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