HATIM A. Tyabji has a vision. Tyabji is chairman, president and CEO of VeriFone, Inc., a former Hawaii company that revolutionized buying by credit card. Now based in Redwood City, Calif., it just merged with Hewlett Packard. Brother, can you
spare a byte?Remember waiting for the clerk to telephone for an authorization code, check your card number against a list of stolen or lost cards and squash it against a triplicate form interleaved with carbon-paper? Offering the carbons to the customer along with the smudged receipt was considered the height of good, if slow, service.
VeriFone ended that with electronic card-swipes and online payment authorization. Now, it's leading the next revolution: cash cards. The cash card will look like a credit card but have a chip embedded in it. Value programmed into the chip will move from my card to the merchant when I buy something. Tyabji envisions card swipes built into the next generation of home computer keyboards, cable TV boxes, vending machines and cellular phones, so people can shop anywhere.
We'll have ''personal ATMs'' the size of a deck of cards that will download dollars from our banks to our cards over the phone.
This fall, test-market consumers and businesses in Manhattan, Sweden and Jakarta will get the first batch of machines and cash cards. In three to five years, the credit card will be as obsolescent as gold coins. According to Tyabji, you can take that to the bank.