Leaving your wallet behind

For the last 4 or 5 years I have been praying to the digital gods that they come up with something that can truly deliver on the promise of allowing me to totally ditch my wallet. Leave it behind. Forget about it.

Today, many companies advertise such thing, like Apple with their new Apple Pay, and Loop with their different systems to replace the need for credit cards to pay for goods and services — always using an image of an over-filled men wallet, by the way- . However, none of these services have been able to solve the big picture, even though they are getting closer.

The typical wallet holds more than just your payment methods, and that’s where the problem is. If authorities still need a physical drivers license to ID you, then that means you need to carry it with you. Since Costco still requests a physical card to enter their stores, then you have to carry that too. And if you are an alien in the US (an immigrant, that is), you need to carry your Permanent Residence Card too. So long to the concept of leaving my wallet behind. Also, you probably have your insurance card with you, some old receipts from purchases and more than one credit card together with the debit cards.

Let’s forget the ID and loyalty cards for a second. Also, let’s assume that you can aggregate your payment cards into Apple Pay, Softcard (formerly ISIS)or Google Wallet.

Fantastic concept, BUT, they don’t work in the majority of places where you shop (a restaurant, for example, still needs to take the card with them to swipe it far and away from your eyes). If you are a techie, you might have one of those Loop keychain fobs or cases that you can use in a lot more places where traditional point of sales systems exist and don’t yet have the NFC technology that Apple and Google use (you can even hand that fob to your waiter and be independent from it, while more secure against prying eyes). The problem is that Loop doesn’t always work, so you probably want to have a spare credit card with you.

And here comes a concept that I really like: One Coin and Plstic. A credit card sized device that copies the info from your regular cards and writes the magnetic strip time and time again with the card of your choosing so you can use it in theoretically all situations and systems. Except it won’t work (when it comes out in 2015, after a long wait and even longer delay) with the type of machines that swallow the cards. None of the aforementioned systems would work in this relatively rare use case anyways.

All alternatives are flawed today. This is because of the heavy fragmentation of point of sales systems, the lack of standards, and the enormous amount of use cases for a solution.

I believe that a mix of all methods is a decent solution for 2015, BUT, come 2018 and we should have phones embedding Loop technology, plus NFC.

But here is my main dream: the day when your form of identification is not a printed plastic with crafty security measures, but a more sophisticated method of two factor authentication, digitally available and always on, but doesn’t involve a heavy government control on the data that is contained and shared about us.