Electronic Payments in Retrospect

The “cashless and checkless” society has been a dominant theme in the thinking of bankers for twenty years. Because electronic funds transfer (EFT) represents a breakthrough in the payment process, most discussions of electronic payments have dealt only with expected future developments. In contrast, this article focuses on the lessons of the past. There is now enough experience with EFT to permit a meaningful historical examination of the uses and successes of electronic payments