Forty percent of commerce is still done with cash and check, but the percentage is slipping every year. Apple CEO Tim Cook turned heads this past November during his keynote at Trinity College, Dublin when he told the assembled that “your kids will not know” what cash is. The remark seemed to substantiate reports that Apple is in discussions with several large banks to develop a P2P banking system that would allow users to seamlessly transact payments between wireless devices. Facebook and Google are also rumored to be developing similar P2P payment systems, setting the stage for a truly competitive market sooner than we may have thought. The success of the November IPO of Square, the mobile payments company co-founded by Jack Dorsey, and the continued growth of PayPal’s Venmo, which plans to launch in 2017, means that there’s a lot of money riding on whether your kids will know what cash is.
MSN.com, Top 10 Business Stories of 2015