When a friend of mine—one of the pioneers of the fintech industry—recently revealed that he had placed a bank card into his phone's pay app for the first time, I was honestly shocked. He was venturing into the uncharted territory of utilizing a phone for business purposes with cautious steps. He asked whether I would bring a card in case. I declined and took a charging wire instead!

I haven't gone through the conversion procedure of adding a card to my mobile wallet in a long time. Although I used to carry a physical card as a backup, I soon realized that using my phone to make payments almost never went wrong. As a result, I stopped relying on my physical wallet and left it at home, only for it to disappear into the kitchen drawer that seems to hold all the random objects from daily life.

I was in London one day for a meeting. I made the decision to have a swim in the nearby Lido on my way home from the conference. I wanted a cup of coffee, though, first.

A catastrophe occurred. My phone ran out of battery when I went to pay for a coffee. Is there anyone else who has ever left their phone charging all night just to find out later that someone else thought their phone was more important? No phone equals no money, therefore there's no way to get home. Worse, I didn't have a charging cord. I had to ask the kiosk if they had a charger, and while my phone charged enough, I stood about looking like a lemon.

I had to deal with the contemporary conundrum that my buddy had inquired about. Do I need to carry a card? Or should I just bring a charging wire and forget the card? I believed that a charging cord was more valuable. Ultimately, a phone is about more than simply money.

Therefore, may a charging cable take the role of a real payment card? Perhaps after reading this, some banks will realize there's a market for branded charging cables.

How come banks still send us paper money? Is it due to regulations? That isn't the case, claims ChatGPT.

The capacity to make ATM withdrawals and make payments in nations where smartphone use is low is the only benefit that plastic cards have over mobile wallets. That benefit, though, may not last very long, in my opinion, as phones link to ATMs more often and mobile wallets are available everywhere. material cards are a massive waste of material and energy that are gradually going out of style. Banks have significant environmental potential if they completely give them up, and more and more institutions are just providing physical cards as a backup alternative.

However, a sizable quantity of plastic cards are still in circulation. According to one estimate, there are more than 20 billion credit cards in use worldwide—many of which are PVC—and the majority of them appear to be in my kitchen drawer. Approximately 100,000 tons, or 223 Boeing 747 "Jumbo Jets," of plastic are used annually for payment cards, assuming that each card weighs five grams on average.

Lastly, if every credit card in existence were stacked end to end, they would measure around 1,712,000 kilometers. To put things in perspective, the average distance between Earth and the Moon is around 384,000 kilometers, which means that this deck of cards may go beyond four times around the planet.

Businesses are switching to more ecologically friendly materials. For example, 85% of the plastic used to make HSBC's and Bank of America's debit, credit, and business cards is now recycled. They work with rPVC, a material derived from recycled PVC. American Express and Revolut provide metal credit cards.

However, the great majority of cards in use today are still made of single-use plastic.

To produce, store, and distribute them, a significant amount of energy and water are probably required.

Are we witnessing the emergence of new trends? I may have realized more than once that I required a card for a trip abroad, given up trying to locate it in "that cursed draw" after failing the first time, and then concluded it would be simpler to get a new one. You may request a card using modern bank processes, and it will usually come one to two days later.

Now, every time, the old card shows under an old birthday card that I've been holding onto since, as a fiftysomething, I never got any others.

I'm probably not alone, but I might be.

I'm not advocating doing away with cards completely. That would affect those who require a bank card but do not own cellphones. But perhaps this is the right moment to urge us to carefully consider whether we really need them, as several institutions are already doing.

It's time, therefore, to make sure I always have a reliable charging cord with me and to politely decline requests for fresh or replacement cards.