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 |  | |  | Debit cards steadily grow in popularity OKLAHOMA CITY, OK - To get an idea of how much plastic has infiltrated your financial life, look no further than just two places: your mailbox and your wallet.
| | | | If you're like most Americans, you get countless pieces of junk mail for new credit cards every week. And according to recent studies, most households carry an average of seven cards - everything from credit and debit cards to ATM, store and gas cards.
But one newer piece of plastic isn't credit at all: Debit cards have been the most successful cards in recent years. They allow consumers to pay for products like a credit card, but the amount is deducted from a checking account.
Consumers increasingly are using debit cards to pay for everything from gas to fast food, eroding the traditional methods of cash and checks.
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 | Contactless Cards In a previous column, I predicted that in the USA, wide usage of smart cards will begin with contactless IC cards ahead of cards with contacts. Contact IC cards offer no advantage to consumers. A business case is not possible in the USA because extensive and inexpensive telecommunications negate any need for data storage or account authentication on a card.
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| Now it is a different story with contactless cards which definitely offer a convenience factor to consumers. The convenience factor for a consumer translates to a marketing factor to business. There are actually two major categories of contactless cards now being widely used in
the USA.
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| The first category is not normally thought of as a "contactless card." It is the contactless bar coded card (CBCC) which is just waived over the slot scanners used extensively in retail applications. | |
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