How to kill off a few start-ups and save some trees in the process.

Banks are perfectly placed to get rid of paper receipts than the few start-ups out there trying. Here’s how.

Paper receipts are useless. They clog up wallets and purses and often only prove to be useful once they are tossed away.

Fill up with petrol, get a receipt. Buy a coke and a pie, get a receipt. Sometimes you get two because there’s one for the actual transaction and another for the card transaction.

Whose bright idea was that?

A recent trip to a petrol station earned me four receipts. Two for a cup of coffee and a muffin and one for 49l of petrol. The final one was for the Avios loyalty scheme. That receipt told me I had earned points but not how many, nor what my current points balance was.

A quick Google search reveals that in the U.S. “over 250 million gallons of oil, 10 million trees and 1 billion gallons of water are consumed each year in the creation of receipts” for one year.

For the metrically inclined, that’s around 946 million litres of oil and over 3,7 billion litres of water. And the ten million trees could cover Wales.

Somewhere a whale is crying.

So why has the paper receipt not become a thing of the past? It’s been ripe for disruption for years. Another quick Google search shows there have been various attempts over the last decade to do away with them but none seem to have been successful because surprise, surprise, we still get them.

A quick look at the various approaches show varying degrees of innovation. Note: innovation here means requiring more steps than it currently takes to do something, but that’s okay because you get another badly designed app to use and lose amongst the rest on your phone.

The advent of services like Apple Pay and Google Wallet has certainly brought disruption to the market but it still involves having a third party sit between us, merchants and banks. This means more steps between each party and more ways for the system to go wrong or get penetrated by hackers.

So here’s the idea. Instead of trying to create an entirely new turnkey system for this problem, augment the current one.

Do we really need another app from a third party with another website to register on?

Fuck. No.

“The great thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from.”

Banking systems already keep all the transactions between us and merchants, so why not include the rest of the sale’s details? The systems are secure too (relative to anything new and/or untested), integrated into our daily life, and the banks have done much of the work standardising the information exchange to make everything work.

Need proof of purchase or to double check something? Log into the banking app you already use.

Sweet.

Need to claim back an expense for work? Email it to finance from the same app.

Easy.

Need to return something? Wave your phone at NFC enabled POS terminal that syncs your records with the store’s, verifying the frivolous purchase your S.O. didn’t approve of.

Job done (although losing the receipt in this context would have worked out fine too).

This system can’t be that difficult compared to the complex and time-consuming building of an entirely new one. FNB, Absa, VISA, MasterCard, come on guys and girls. I dare you to try this. Do something else better than just taking our money.