Why do we use cash? Why do we use banks? The basic premise is that banks are necessary to create a flow of cash and enable commerce, with built in protections. Secondly, they can hang on to our money securely, and although we don’t get much interest these days, we do generally have the protection of the FDIC or some other mechanism to ensure we never lose our deposit. However, these days when we deposit money it just generally sits on some computer as ones and zeros, we don’t physically (or vary rarely) go down the the bank and actually deposit cash over the counter. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I ever deposited or withdrew cash from a bank branch. I know I go to the ATM to get cash out, but all my deposits these days are generally electronic.

The problem with pervasive mobile payments is that the value proposition for my bank just got cut in half. In a very short period of time, I may never even have to use my bank’s ATM at all. I certainly won’t be using checks. In fact, the last check I wrote was more than a year ago – so I won’t miss them…

Tags: ATM, banking, Bump, Check, Cheques, Contactless, iPhone, NFC, Octopus, Oyster, P2P, payments, PayPal, Pervasive, point-of-impact, POPMoney, Square, Verifone