Electronic Payments (Cards & ATMs)
Charge and credit cards (1950-58), cash machines (1967-69) and the SWIFT bank network (1973-77) moved everyday money from coins and cheques to computer records.
Open in the interactive tree →Diners Club launched the first general-purpose charge card in 1950, and Bank of America's BankAmericard (1958) became the first successful modern credit card. The first cash machines appeared in 1967 in London (Barclays, John Shepherd-Barron) and in 1969 in New York (Docutel, Don Wetzel), and the networked machine connected a customer to the bank account in real time. In 1973 239 banks from 15 countries founded SWIFT in Brussels to replace telex for payment messages, and its first messages went out in 1977. Newer money systems such as mobile money, stablecoins and the planned digital euro are built to work with, or to compete with, these card and bank networks.
Prerequisites
- Money~600 BC
- Banks & Double-Entry Bookkeeping~1340-1494Cards and ATMs post transactions to bank account books.
- Stored-Program Computer (von Neumann)1945Banks ran card and cash-machine accounts on stored-program computers.
Unlocks
- E-Commerce & Fulfilment1995Online shops take payment through credit-card networks.
- Digital Euro2026A motive for the digital euro is independence from non-EU card networks.