Solving One Of Buisness’ Scourges — It’s Simple!
Every once in a while Joe and I will have a phone call in the evening to catch up with the day’s business and it will end at 3am (or later!). This usually means that we spent 30 minutes talking about the work day and 5.5 hours talking about insane possibilities, whether it be new technology potentials, our dream hardware configuration, how to kill spam, paths to world peace, etc.
One night several years ago we talked about how lame the current system for accepting credit cards is. Don’t get me wrong, it looks like a natural evolution and wasn’t terrible in the early days, but it is antiquated and prone to abuse and costs us $billions now that we’re in the 21st century.
The current system is akin to me going to a store and attempting to pay for something. The store owner asks for my wallet and removes the proper amount of money, returning my wallet to me. That just doesn’t make sense in a day where the store owner now has access to my wallet any time he likes. Sure, I trust most store owners to not abuse that access but it is also possible that they could become careless and accidentally allow someone else to access my wallet.
The solution seems quite simple to me though I’m sure “smart” people will point out the flaws. Still, I feel certain (based solely on “feeling”) that this has a basis for a real solution. It goes something like this:
When I go to buy something, the store owner gives me his *deposit only* account number and I drop money into his account, something he can verify immediately. The only folks to know my card number are those who work for Visa, MasterCard, etc.; And the only folks who can cause a refund are the credit card provider.
Basically, it returns payment to how it should be: You tell me how much and I give you that amount, without the ability to extract more.
It’s true that someone may still be able to get my credit card number but it won’t be floating around all over the place. What floats around are a bunch of deposit-only account numbers which are basically useless to the bad guys.
If I belong to a gym (hah!) and I don’t want to pay any longer, I simply cease depositing money in their account each month — They have no way of causing me pain and major hassle in trying to get them to stop charging my account, other than the natural method of pursuing bad debt, if that was the case.
That’s it; It’s simple, right? Problems with this idea?
I should note that the basics behind this came from Joe during one of our late night conversations. Once upon a time we thought we’d start a company to do just this sort of thing and hopefully eat Visa’s lunch, but my aspirations aren’t so high as to make the required time/brain commitment to make it all happen. Will one of you please do it for me? I’ll just take a small cut of the profits.
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