2023-09-03 plastic money

For consumers, this provides a level of optional anonymity that simply isn’t possible using a conventional credit card. You’re just spending digital cash in a P2P setting.

Once financial services were digital, they no longer needed to exist as discrete products; they could become embedded in software that consumers and businesses use all day long, and with which they have a durable and data-rich relationship. We are early in that process, and it requires imagination to see where it ends. For a while, it’s just going ... See more

For this digital, embedded, and decentralized world to reach its full potential, there are meaningful problems to be solved. We must be able to establish identity, at point of transaction and over time, even if pseudonymous. We must have real time and persistent credit risk management, for people, businesses and for specific obligations between and... See more

At first glance, this might seem counterintuitive. If you are building a mobile-first bank, why not offer virtual cards and let users pay with their phone? Why go through the hassle of producing and shipping physical cards?

It also makes intuitive sense that we’d have digital money that’s programmable. We'‘re programming everything now; mRNA is basically running a program on the cellular level. Many of the current problems in the digital economy -- lack of trust, misaligned incentives, controlling gatekeepers, treating audiences as a resource to be exploited -- arise ... See more

Interestingly though, neobanks still use one very traditional banking element: physical cards.

You may have noticed that the credit card number has moved from the front to the back of the card. This makes it easier for users to share photos of their cards on social media as an additional signaling distribution channel.

-Another new capability is that the code can actually hold money