A new 65-country study on payment cards has some numbers that surprised me — the number of payment cards in the world has grown to 7.4 billion, of which about 62% are debit rather than credit cards.  The study projects growth to 10.1 billion by 2014, largely (of course) because of possible growth in Asia. About half of all transactions come from North America, while Asia accounts for only 17%, even though Asia actually has more cards outstanding.

The world also had 32 million EFTPOS terminals in 2009, projected to rise to 44.5 million in 2014.

This being a bank-sponsored study, it does not look at another dimension of the electronics payments revolution — the mobile phone, where there is considerable interest in card-less EFT systems. These would be sort-of competitive and sort-of not, since they would (I assume) be integrated into the existing fund transfer networks, but it is not all clear how this would effect the existing players of the cards game, such as the issuing banks and the great brands such as Visa and MasterCard, which issue half of the outstanding cards.

As with all the other ongoing technological revolutions, it is hard to bend one’s mind around the consequences. Intuitively, allowing small operators of all kinds access to efficient payment mechanisms must be good for reduced transaction costs, competition, the growth of niche players, and globalization, so it all seems beneficent.

I am not at all clear as to the requirements of these payments networks for security, or for integration with other tech services, such as Internet connectivity, so I do not know if this is another area in which the hard-core partisans of net neutrality could succeed in screwing things up.

The Electronic Transactions Association is holding Electronic Payments Education Day up on Capitol Hill next Friday (Oct. 1), so maybe I will get answers to some of these questions.

It really is an amazing revolution. I am old enough to remember the pre-ATM days, when getting cash for the weekend required you to plan ahead to get to the bank before 3:00 p.m. on Friday, and it was not all that long ago when most long-distance transactions had to be delayed for a couple of weeks to allow time for the check to clear.

Image from Visa, via Bloomberg.