History of credit cards (Plastic Cards)

The first plastic card wasn’t plastic at all. Cards started life on the other side of the Atlantic as ‘metal money’ in 1914 when the US Western Union started providing metal cards that gave free payment privileges to preferred customers.

The first proper plastic card was a charge card issued by American Express in 1958. It was 1963 before this made it over to Britain and was swiftly followed by the ‘Barclaycard’, the UK’s first credit card launched on 29 June 1966.

Since then, cards have gone from strength to strength with more people taking up the ‘flexible friend’ and new features, like cashback, being introduced. Concerns grew about rising fraud and card security during the 90s.

This led to the introduction of chip and PIN in 2003 – the biggest consumer change to
the way we pay since decimalisation.

The final switch over to chip and PIN happened on Valentine’s Day 2006.

Future developments

2006 saw new ‘smart card’ technology introduced into the world of card payments – opening up a whole new range of possibilities:

• Replacing cash –
cash is still king for payments under £5. However, the introduction of contactless cards could change all that – the future could see an increase in the number of card payments for small purchases such as newspapers and sandwiches as these cards are launched throughout the UK in the forthcoming year.

• Prepaid cards –
a whole range of new prepaid cards are coming onto the market which allow temporary workers to receive wages electronically or younger people to use these cards to make purchases online.

• Cards that do –
in the near future you could be carrying just one card in your wallet. It’s likely that card companies will have the technology to put your debit and credit cards or new loyalty or gift schemes onto a single card. Not only that, even you office access card, your phone card, sim card, etc. may be all integrated into one single card – who knows.

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