The New Scientist has published an article on e-money (subscription needed to read the full article) – using chip cards to make “micro-payments” to pay for tickets, meals and so on.
This isn’t the first English language article to report on e-money, but for some reason the authors have always managed to overlook Germany. New Scientist quotes the London Transport Oyster Card, with 3.2 million users as an example of a potentially successful implementation (there have been several failures to implement an e-money card in the UK), but in Germany there are 63 million Geldkarten issued and some 200 000 acceptance points which handled nearly 40 million payments in 2003, making it the world’s largest e-money system.
While not every Geldkarte is being actively used (they are issued by default on your ec-card by some banks) this is nonetheless a sizeable user-base and you can use them to pay for carpark tickets, tram and subway tickets, postage stamps and even Big Macs in over 400 German towns.
3 Comments
test!?
oh, i can comment again. =)
i accept the geldkarte in my shop since 1998 – but guess what?! – no single person wanted to pay with it!?
Well, my bank doesn’t offer Geldkarte, so I actually buy one from the local building society (Sparkasse) every couple of years.
BUT I admit, I mainly use it to pay for parking when we go shopping (it’s more convenient because you don’t have to go to a payment point before you go to your car, and you get a 5-10% discount).
If I am buying something in a shop, I must confess that I usually pay with my ec-card or a credit card – mainly because I tend to leave the Geldkarte in the car all the time.
Actually, if my bank offered the chip on my bank card, I probably would use it more, because I’d have it with me.