Thursday, August 03, 2006
What the credit card companies need to sell is a device that informs you in real time of an attempt to charge to your card. You then have some amount of time to approve the transaction. If you do not approve the transaction in time, or explicitly reject it, the payment is declined. You should also be able to whitelist some merchant so that their transactions are automatically approved. The query should happen as close to instantaneously as possible, so that you can use it to authorize transactions at any ordinary retail establishment. Alternatively, instead of a standalone device, it could be integrated with a phone, perhaps as just a text message exchange. I know Paypal is working on something like that, but Paypal is not supported nearly as much as credit cards, especially not in the physical world. Of course, as someone who as to work with credit cards, processors, and the bizarre mainframes that drive it all, I know it wouldn't be easy. But it's definitely an idea whose time has come.