On the Brink of Cashless: The Evolution of Payment Methods
Once upon a time the cavemen of the world paid for goods not in money, but in favours or trade. An eye for an eye, a dead cow for a some sandals.
Today, well, it's a little bit different.
Methods in payment have developed dramatically over the centuries, in fact the last decade has seen enough revolution alone.
The development of coins transformed the way we pay for goods and when the first card was released in the UK by Barclays in 1966, it signified a phenomenon that has failed to slow down.
The advent of the internet and its development has added to that, meaning we can use all sorts of industries online from shopping, to renting movies, and even playing online bingo and casino games.
That's all down to the development of security within our methods of payment, but we'll get to that.
The Early Days Of Card Payment
We're going to begin at the very early days of card payment. After all, the development from bartering to coins, decimalisation and notes is a fairly well known history.
However, the first card arrived in the 1960s, with cash machines arriving in Europe just a year later in 1967 in London.
Credit cards shortly followed, and by the 1980s we began to see electronic payments in stores around the continent.
That marked a significant change in how we began to pay for our goods.
By 1990, France had introduced the continent's first chip and pin card. In 1997 that made its way to the UK and by 2001 half of all payments in the country were made by card.
The Online Revolution
Alongside the rise of card payments was also a real advancement in online payments and shopping.
The mid-1990s welcomed the new payment opportunity and by 1995 the likes of eBay, Amazon and leisure activities such as online casino were all in full through.
This was possible thanks to impressive security measures which have enhanced incredibly to provide safe payment methods that are almost unhackable today. Many major gambling brands like 888, William Hill and Ladbrokes have launched bingo games on their established platforms.
One of the primary reasons for the growth in the online bingo market is because paying online today is safer than ever before, particularly via mobile with you needing to use fingerprint recognition to purchase apps, make deposits on bingo sites and other gambling platforms and make a payment on pretty much any app, whether it be retail or service based.
The Future
The future is forever changing when it comes to methods of payment. We now have more options than ever.
Contactless has of course become a worldwide hit with cardholders, while the likes of Apple Pay and mobile payments mean we no longer even require a piece of plastic to pay.
What's next will continue to shake up the methods in which we pay. Wearable technology is bound to catch on while inventions such as the Amazon Echo is also set to see more and more payments processed through it.
It's thought that 81 million payments were sent through speaker devices last year, with that figure to rise by 81% by 2021.
One thing is for sure, it's a little hard to really know what's next. Payment via watch and the like is most certainly going to pick up, but in a decade's time, who knows where we'll be at?