200 individuals were the first to receive credit cards issued by Diners Club in 1950, the brainchild of Frank McNamara. It was the start of a completely new era in personal credit and payments. American Express entered the credit business with its own card in 1958, and within five years had issued more than a million cards.
Today there are more than 1.6 billion credit cards in circulation, and the US credit cards industry generates $2.8 billion dollars a year in revenue. One in 12 households in London (or 8 per cent) have used credit cards to pay their mortgage or rent in the last 12 months and outstanding credit card balances stood at £63.5 billion in November 2009. By 2013, China's consumer credit market--encompassing credit cards, mortgages, and other personal loans--will account for 14 percent of profits in the banking sector.
"Contactless is as revolutionary as the shift to internet payments was five years ago. It will mean having no notes and coins -- it will certainly mean having no coins. It will move us almost to a cashless society." - Steve Perry, Visa Europe
Some of the detail behind Apple's NFC patent for the iPhone
The question you are probably asking is, how will the payment mechanism work? Here's where it is largely speculation because Apple is being extremely tight lipped. We know that the primary payment app will work as an interface to your bank or credit card company as you need it to. However, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that Apple could use its current iTunes store platform to provide stored value for an effective debit card mechanism. If Apple was to use this mechanism as the underlying currency or stored value behind their core 'debit card' equivalent payment capability, they would effectively become a bank overnight, and one with perhaps an even stronger differentiation than any other debit card on the market today. Other handset manufacturers and mobile platform providers would be sure to follow as Apple's payment capability quickly becomes ubiquitous. That is, if the payment networks talk to Apple's iTunes store...
So the question for banks in this new environment would be how do we now issue cards to customers? Do they have to come into the branch for us to configure their phone? Given how easy it is to upload iTunes credit, this would be a huge competitive disadvantage, so the compliance procedures applied to the current physical process of card issuance become a millstone around the bank's neck and result in rapid disintermediation. Within the space of 3-5 years, banks no longer have a credit card business. Sure, they might eke out a small business settling payments between Apple's iTunes store and the bank, but compared with the size of the card business today this would be miniscule.
Don't be tempted to think that the protection of existing payments networks or a bank license will protect your existing business from such innovation. If Apple does launch their NFC phone and announces collaboration through Visa and Mastercard's payment network, do you honestly think with millions of iPhone 5's going out the door that the regulator is going to call a halt to payments from a phone?
Seriously, if you are a bank, it's likely that in just 8-9 months you'll be faced with competition from non-banks who can do the whole NFC-enabled phone payments thing much faster, easier and more compelling than you ever could by issuing a plastic debit or credit card. And guess what?
If you're the CEO of a bank, you probably don't even have someone appointed to work on mobile credit card onboarding yet, so what's the likelihood you'll be ready to compete?
Let's try plan B - let's go to the regulators and see if we can stop mobile phone payments as a mechanism shall we?
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"Card Tricks Revealed: How Not To Burn Money"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKRHiA0tYCc