Most anywhere in the developed world, I can use a small rectangular piece of plastic, issued to me by a bank I have never visited, to obtain local currency or purchase goods and services directly from a merchant. The cashier and I may not even speak a common language, and the face of my card may look quite different from those carried by locals, but the cashier will nevertheless recognize my card as an acceptable form of payment. My account may be measured in a different currency unit from the merchant’s, but no haggling over foreign exchange rates needs to take place. Although my bank may be on the opposite side of the world and closed for the night, the cashier can insert my card into a small, relatively inexpensive terminal and in a few seconds receive what amounts to a guarantee of payment. Even if our respective banks participate in entirely different banking systems, that merchant will have access to those funds, converted to local currency, generally within a day.

It is perhaps a sign of the increasing rate of technological change that we, after a relatively short period of time, have ceased to find this surprising. Fifty years ago, paying for goods and services outside your local area typically required the use of pre-purchased local currency or travelers cheques, and if you ran out, your options for obtaining more funds away from home were limited. Today, we hardly think twice about leaving home with nothing but a payment card, and rarely reflect on how these little bits of plastic, as well as the systems they access, have fundamentally changed the ways in which we exchange monetary value. As with countless other technological innovations, we have come to regard these electronic payment networks as “normal” or even “natural.”

But there is nothing “natural” about electronic payment systems. Although those born after the 1990s might never have known a time without them, payment cards and the electronic networks they activate went through an explicit process of creation and adoption, a process which actively shaped these systems into what they are today. If one wants to understand why these systems ended up the way they did, one first needs to understand their origins, and how decisions made in their early years fundamentally shaped the way they evolved.