I attended two conferences last week – the CARTES North America conference and the Digital Signage Expo, both in Las Vegas. CARTES is not the kind of conference that a lot of retailers attend. This is a banking show – the vendors sell technologies that make credit cards or provide services around credit cards. The buyers are card issuers – who also are a lot of the people that are going to turn around and try to convince retailers to carry their products or accept their credit instruments from consumers.

I am now firmly convinced that I will see a cashless society before I ever own a flying car. I have come to this conclusion after CARTES: Bankers are plotting – and designing – the future of how retail transactions will be conducted, and there weren’t any retailers in the room participating. That strikes me as something that retailers should be nervous about.

We’re at a unique inflection point in the United States when it comes to payments. The rest of the world has moved on from the boring old mag-stripe cards to EMV, more commonly known as chip and PIN. For those of you who have not experienced the humiliation of trying to pay with your ratty old American plastic credit card abroad, chip and PIN provides an extra layer of security, basically between the card and the user, before you even connect to the network to authorize payment. So if someone steals your card, they can’t use it unless they also manage to get their hands on your PIN.

This is what’s coming to the US by 2015, thanks to a new round of mandates coming out of VISA and MasterCard. Interestingly, though, the mandates come at a time when the payments industry is wildly disrupted – mainly by the inter-related technologies of NFC (near-field communication) and mobile wallets. While at CARTES, I saw demos of the next generation of chip & PIN that are being piloted in Europe – where they too are considering how to move beyond the first version of chip & PIN that they are currently using.

Things like Natural Security’s biometrics and NFC version of chip & PIN, where your fingerprint or fingervein or some other biometric-based identifier takes the place of the PIN. Things like Oberthur’s card-centered authorization, which could enable chip & PIN levels of authentication online – the card itself is where you enter the PIN, and the card has a little screen on it that returns an authorization code that you enter along with a credit card number to confirm that the card was present at an online transaction (I guess I will no longer be able to just memorize my main credit card number, sadly).

Seeing the innovations that are being tested in Europe, where EMV has had a chance to mature, I can’t help but think there is a huge opportunity here in the US. Why go to all the trouble of implementing technologies that even Europe is already moving on from, when this market has an opportunity to leapfrog into the wild future of mobile wallets and NFC?

Well, the problem is that efforts around these two technologies have never gotten very far. Between everyone wanting to create some kind of proprietary something, so that they can carve off their own little piece of the transaction, and the questions and confusion around consumer adoption, neither NFC nor mobile wallets have gotten very far. So at CARTES, it was interesting to see two things: one, an emphasis on “open” – panelists of all stripes spent a lot of time advocating for an open approach to mobile payments, basically saying “give up trying to own it and let’s just build the highway so that people can start driving cars.” To take the analogy further, the money isn’t going to be made from building a toll road. It’s going to be made from selling cars and the things that make cars run.

Two, the payments industry people spent a lot of time talking about how NOT focusing on payments will do more to benefit their piece of the industry than anything else. And so we had examples cited of “tap to download” or “What if you could tap your phone to someone else’s phone and trade LinkedIn profiles?” Funny thing, that transitions right into what the Digital Signage Expo was all about! Nearly everyone on the show floor had some kind of interactive display, whether based on cameras or Kinect-type technology (“no touch”) or touch screen or multi-touch, or even “Scan this QR code to use your phone as a remote control for this giant screen”. There were some robust discussions on panels about the value of QR codes over NFC.

I do agree with one point made – NFC isn’t a solution for every environment. In a large-area environment, a big screen delivers a message to a lot of people. NFC on that screen is only useful to the people standing right next to the screen. But between the two shows, I can envision a retail future that is very interesting – one where I tap my phone on a kiosk as I enter the store to wake up that retailer’s app and get the latest offers. One where I tap my phone against a shelf label to download a coupon or a recipe or as the start of a product comparison – or even to find the out of stock item online. I can envision tap to pay, tap to transfer my pictures from my phone to a photo printer, tap to unlock my car and start it up.

The only thing depressing about that vision is that it was bankers who thought it up! Retail industry, we should be able to do better than that.