Cards as a method of payment were introduced in the late 1800s to facilitate sales in department stores and hotels. Western Union began issuing charge cards to its frequent customers in 1921, and in 1958 American Express created Carte Blanche and the first worldwide charge card network. The rest is history, and the popularity of the plastic card culminated in 2010, when Visa handled a burst of 24,000 transaction per second.
But while we’ve seen great innovation over the past 100 years, including the integration of microchips into all French Carte Bleue debit cards in 1992 and the move to EMV in the US in 2015, using a plastic card simply doesn’t make sense anymore. Merchants are hit with hefty fees, security breaches at large retailers are more and more common and the XML-based APIs offered by most payment gateways are archaic.
New technologies such as PayPal, Venmo, Dwolla, Snapcash, Square Cash and Bitcoin have been paving our future, and it is time to say goodbye to these cards bulging our wallets. So, charge your phones and update your apps, we will remove any card support in Kill Bill in the next release.
