{"id":1135,"date":"2010-08-02T13:16:23","date_gmt":"2010-08-02T20:16:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/?p=1135"},"modified":"2010-08-02T13:16:23","modified_gmt":"2010-08-02T20:16:23","slug":"alternatives-to-credit-cards-and-the-future-of-gift-cards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/?p=1135","title":{"rendered":"Alternatives to credit cards and the future of gift cards"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>AT&amp;T and Verizon, Deutsche Telekon and T-mobile are working with Discover to create an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/2010-08-02\/at-t-verizon-said-to-target-visa-mastercard-with-smartphones.html\" target=\"_blank\">alternative payment network<\/a> to Visa and MasterCard that uses smart-phones instead of credit and debit cards for payment.\u00a0 Could this also be the future of gift cards?<\/p>\n<p>A payment system like this has been talked about in the US since the early days of the Internet and places like Japan and Korea have healthy mobile-phone payment services, but nothing has ever gained traction here.<\/p>\n<p>It is not hard to imagine that such a system could easily handle gift card transactions as well as credit and debit transactions.\u00a0 The chief benefits would be:<\/p>\n<p>Benefits to merchants: Lower cost of issuing cards as everything is electronic; no actual printed card to produce<\/p>\n<p>Benefits to consumers: You will always have your card with you, as long as you have your phone, which is probably most of the time for most people.<\/p>\n<p>Benefits to everyone: less of a chance of the type of fraud that occurs when gift cards are on display and easily accessible.<\/p>\n<p>However, until such a system is ubiquitous, merchants would have to support both the newer electronic system and traditional gift cards, probably increasing costs of gift card programs in the short term.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>AT&amp;T and Verizon, Deutsche Telekon and T-mobile are working with Discover to create an alternative payment network to Visa and MasterCard that uses smart-phones instead of credit and debit cards for payment.\u00a0 Could this also be the future of gift cards? A payment system like this has been talked about in the US since the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1135"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1137,"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135\/revisions\/1137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.giftcardadvocate.org\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}