With the advent of moving into a cashless economy, beyond ATM’s, Money Transfer & Online purchases, there is lot more than meets the eye.

The biggest part about managing this change is the adjustment that a person has to make in his lifestyle.

Basic problems that were not there with cash: remembering passwords; getting OTP’s on your mobile phone; transacting high values; timeouts and rejections after 3 attempts…. These are just a few of the visible considerations a person needs to get attuned to. It’s a great reason why cash is still preferred.

It’s a great opportunity for the software and hardware world to find ways to make this more convenient.

Not everyone is as abled, a move to a cashless system also needs to cater to people who have difficulty with vision, hearing and speech. While they have Braille based touch for currency notes, there has to be innovations on electronic devices like Ownfone which is a cellphone with Braille keys and audio.

Well, much to be said on innovation, it will eventually happen, necessity is the mother of all inventions.
The bigger problem rests with security!

While cash can be lost by neglect, straight forward pick pocket or a bank heist, they all require a physical presence, someone’s got to be there and there has to be notes to grab. In the electronic world, the physical presence is typically absent in most cases, except with an ATM card. There has to be renewed efforts to overcome cyber-theft and phishing. Here, the perpetrator, can hog off millions.

A few banks have setup a reverse ATM pin, if you enter the pin backwards, it will dish out the money but the police will be alerted about your location and a possible felony is in progress. However, people with currency are easier to track, including RFID dust that has been developed and can be easily dusted onto notes.

The only visible defenses are increase password strength, multiple levels of approval, multi notification, IP address tracking. A hacker gaining access thru a vulnerability can probably overcome these defenses.
Here is where a convergence of challenge techniques and Business Intelligence can step up to find out if there is a non-standard pattern to the user’s habits. For example, if you generally withdraw a certain amount every week and you suddenly draw much larger amounts or if your withdrawal location suddenly changes.