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Cashless spending 2008 style revisited

Saturday, January 18, 2025 9:22

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By Brian Clegg

REVISIT SERIES - An updated post from October 2008

The excellent Claudia Hammond has recently done a podcast on the Mondex experiment, an early attempt at a cashless approach to shopping. I took part in this experiment, so it seemed an ideal opportunity to take a look back, both at the experiment itself and how cashless payments differ from what seemed likely in those heady days when contactless and smartphones were in their infancy.

Pretty well everyone needs money really, I guess, but what I meant was ‘who needs cash?’ [The original post was entitled 'Who needs money?'] The irritating chunks of metal that mean I rarely have a pair of trousers that last more than a year without holes appearing in the pockets (hint, trouser designers – stronger pockets, please). And you always accumulate all those copper coins that you can’t be bothered to bag up and take to the bank, so they end up in a charity box or gather dust in a big jar.

Now, when I first moved to the Swindon area a little over 12 years ago, I arrived at the tail end of an experiment that held out hopes of changing all that. It was called Mondex, and it was brilliant.

You got a chip and PIN style card and you downloaded money onto it. Then you used it for all purchases where you’d normally use cash. Of course that’s not so different from a debit card, but this was more controllable, and you could use it at lots of places that wouldn’t have a debit/credit card reader. Where merchants get stung for accepting a credit card in a way that makes buying a bag of sweets that way inacceptable, with Mondex it was fine. Even the street newspaper vendors in Swindon had them.

Perhaps the biggest advantage it had over cash was you could get money at home. With a card-reading/writing Mondex phone, you could put cash on your card whenever you liked.

Now Mondex is a museum piece but Barclays has recently announced the OnePulse card, combining a credit card, Oyster Card and payment card, usable in over 1,000 shops in London for purchases under £10 (though payment does come from the credit card, not loaded cash), which may see the resurrection of the concept. I’m very tempted to get one.

However, I suspect the next generation of cashless payment will be different. The best contenders at the moment are either expanding debit card use so it is acceptable for a 20p purchase (and everyone accepts them, which means slashing the cost to merchants) or using something else like a mobile phone to initiate the payment.

Admittedly we already have this to an extent in those car parks where you can pay by phone, but they are too low tech and desperately slow. With mark II phone payment I would imagine typing a number from the car park (or newspaper vendor or whatever) into my phone (or more likely scanning a barcode or reading an RFID chip), entering the amount I want to pay and paying instantly.

Whatever the technical solution, I just can’t wait to get rid of cash!

I’m rather proud looking back from 2025 just how much I got right – including using a phone and reading an RFID chip (i.e. contactless), though parking apps on the phone were something I’d yet to encounter. I didn’t get a OnePulse, which rapidly disappeared.

Image by Erik Mclean from Unsplash

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.

Source: http://brianclegg.blogspot.com/2025/01/cashless-spending-2008-style-revisited.html

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