A signal of change — palm payment system

Forget about credit cads and Apple Pay

Forget about credit cads and Apple Pay

A Back to The Future character, Doc Brown, uses his thumb to pay for taxi in the second episode of the franchise. It happens in 2015, a time that seemed a distant future from 1989 when the story was filmed. In a real world, we still can’t pay for goods and services using our biometrical data, though some exceptions exist. For example, one may pay for groceries in some Chinese supermarkets by showing their faces to a special scan, so can subway passengers in Moscow. But credit cards and systems such as Apple Pay or Google Pay are still more familiar to us.

But, maybe, it is not for long. Dozens of Whole Foods stores will soon let you pay with just a scan of your palm. One can register their hands at participating stores and can go to the store without a wallet or smartphone.

The only question this piece of news raises is why that hasn’t happened earlier. It is hard to find a more natural and secure way to identify people than using their fingerprints, retina, or faces and even the ways they walk. We have been using our fingerprints and faces to unlock our phones for years. But when it comes to payments, legislation interferes, so this was not a matter of technology; it was a matter of politics.

But this is a very important precedent, so I believe we all will soon forget about payment systems and use our body parts to identify ourselves (and not only in grocery stores). And money will become virtual for good, and our grandkids won’t know that money (or at least its symbolic embodiment, a credit card) used to be something a person could touch.

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