![\"\"](\"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/mw-fi.jpg\" "\\"mw-fi\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nLHS: This pile contained payment related items such as cash, two credit cards and one debit card.<\/p>\n
RHS: All non payment related items went into this pile. A partial list of contents included many store loyalty cards, two driving licenses, one paper receipt, one health insurance card and one alumnus card.<\/p>\n
It was immediately obvious that the pile on the right was much larger than the one on the left. Looks like it’s no different for most people: According to this PandoDaily article<\/strong><\/a>, “Physical wallets, pockets, and purses… carry a wide variety of items, from cash and credit cards to coupons and boarding passes.”<\/p>\n Even people who use many more cards than me on a regular basis can always choose to leave a few of them behind at home. This is possible because payment cards are interchangeable, which means any (open loop) card will work at any store.<\/p>\n For eons, I’m used to handing over my plastic cards at checkout or doing the swipe, dip or tap action myself where the merchant allows it. Therefore, I don’t see a compelling reason to change the way I use my payment cards.<\/p>\n On the other hand, plastic loyalty cards on the RHS are a major source of pain. First of all, there are too many of them to fit in my wallet. I can’t take an arbitrary decision to leave some cards behind since I’d lose rewards when I shop at those stores. Barring a few coalition cards like PAYBACK and NECTAR, loyalty cards are not interchangeable across stores. Secondly, I forfeit rewards on shopping done by others in my family at a certain retailer when its loyalty card is in my wallet.<\/p>\n These are pain areas worth resolving. Mobile wallets fit the bill perfectly. All of them obviate the need to carry multiple cards. Some like KeyRing<\/strong><\/em> allow users to scan a single loyalty card into multiple smartphones, so they can earn rewards whenever any of their family members go shopping.<\/p>\n While I still need to go out and buy another leather wallet, I can avoid cramming all my store loyalty cards into it by moving them to a mobile wallet.\u00a0I can already hear people suffixing the last sentence with “provided merchants accept loyalty cards off of smartphones”. I agree that that’s not a given. But, in the next part of this post, I’ll explain why merchants are lot more likely to accept mobile wallets for loyalty – rather than payment – cards. Watch this space.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My leather wallet wore out recently. With so much buzz around mobile wallets, I was wondering if I should even bother with another leather wallet. Before switching to a mobile wallet, I inventoried the contents of my wallet and arranged them into two piles. LHS: This pile contained payment related items such as cash, two … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1089,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,6,9,10,7,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-b2-product-v-services","category-bfsi","category-ecommerce","category-mobility","category-retail","category-mandatory-category"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1001"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7221,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001\/revisions\/7221"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>Looking at the plastic payment cards on the LHS,\u00a0I realized –\u00a0like many others<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0– that nothing is broken with them. It’s no big deal carrying two credit cards and one debit card.<\/p>\n