BROOMFIELD, Colo. (CNN/Money) -
I saw the future of money this week. It's exciting. And scary. And, for better or worse, the future isn't going to happen any time soon.
My crystal ball was supplied by the DaVinci Institute, a futurist group near Denver that takes seriously its commitment to its namesake. A portrait of Leonardo -- albeit one that looks more like the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi than the original renaissance man -- sits on an easel at every session of a conference the group put on this week.
The overall topic was how we're all going to pay for things as time goes by.
Futurists may be concerned with money flows in the Jetsons era to come. Today, though, folks working in the electronic-payment industry are far more preoccupied with fraud, identity theft and other nefarious downsides of the paperless payment revolution.
| Recently by Adam Lashinsky
|
|
|
|
|
Gartner analyst Avivah Litan, for example, reports that most instances of identity theft don't even get recorded. Banks simply account for such losses in their bad debt provisions, preferring to sweep under the rug the thorny problem of just how easy it is to steal someone's name for your own financial gain.
Gideon Samid, who learned about security in the Israeli intelligence apparatus, is at work on an encrypted PIN number in the form of a unique signature that could be reproduced only by its owner. Today's PINs, after all, can be stolen simply by training a telephoto lens at someone punching it into the ATM.
Happily, some fears about the future aren't warranted. One conference attendee wanted to know if it's true that individuals can be traced by the information in their electronic hotel keys. That's an urban legend, reports Greg Berry, a journalist who looks at digital-identity issues and has investigated the topic recently.
YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS
|
Follow the news that matters to you. Create your own alert to be notified on topics you're interested in.
Or, visit Popular Alerts for suggestions.
|
|
|
 |
On the exciting side, a bevy of companies plans to take electronic-payment processing into a brave new world. Bitpass, a Palo Alto startup, aims to be for small digital publishers what PayPal is to eBay users: the preferred way to get folks to pay for their products.
Bitpass makes it easy for you to pay a couple bucks for an article on the Web, a transaction that at this point wouldn't be of great interest to the credit-card companies. Xoom is a new company making it easier for people to send money to developing countries, a burgeoning market.
There was a far-out feeling to the proceedings at the Future of Money Summit. Linda Elliott, a longtime Visa executive, thinks that some of the changes coming with digital identities, changes that will make it possible for each of us to pay for anything without opening our wallets at all, will represent "a quantum leap in portability and security" similar to the changes brought by credit cards. But the changes are still years away.
Adam Lashinsky is a senior writer for Fortune magazine. Send e-mail to Adam at lashinskysbottomline@yahoo.com.
Sign up to receive The Bottom Line by e-mail.
|
