The credit card
Last updated
Last updated
John Biggins of the Flatbush National Bank of Brooklin in New York created the first bank-issued card with the "Charge-it" system.
This was the beginning of the idea of a credit card. A credit card to this day is nothing but a key to access money deposited in a bank through the internet. In 1950 Frank Macnamara created the Diners Club card which allowed cardholders to pay at restaurants and get billed after.
In the following years, the concept of electronic debit and credit cards took off, and soon, all banks were using them.
Initially, the banks used electronic cards in combination with ATMs to give their clients the ability to withdraw paper money without having to interact with a human, the ATM reduced human resources costs.
After this, banks implemented payment systems both at physical locations for companies and soon you could use your credit card to pay for internet orders from home using their systems which were full of security flaws as they always used old/deprecated software.