Re:It'll fail (Score 1)

I used to live in Guelph, Ontario, the other Mondex test city. We had mondex in the parking meters, mondex on the buses, in the coffee shops, the pay phones, pretty much everwhere. Lots of people even got the free Mondex phones that let you transfer money out of your bank account on to your card at home.That was probably the best feature of them. As I recall you could do the same at payphones. If you used the ATM to do it it cost you a $0.25 fee, which I thought was just ridiculous. Why would I pay extra to put my money on this little card thing?

The biggest problem was speed. It was MUCH faster to pay with cash. But at that time Interac payments were only just starting to take hold and I suspect that Mondex was faster than Interac because there was no waiting around for the customer to key in a PIN. Getting on the bus was excruciating, waiting for the mondex card of the guy at the front of the line to do its magic while you shivered out in the snow.

Beyond that it was hard to explain to people why this was better than cash or interac. Unlike Interac (or cell phone payment) if you lost your Mondex card you lost your money. You could also lock the mondex cards with a code, but if you forgot that then I believe your money was gone. Cell phone payments might work better if they're fast and there's no stored value on the phone (so if you lose it you can just call in and block any purchases).

Mondex did have these cool little reader devices that looked sort of like calculators. You put your card in it and it told you how much was stored on the card. At least one model let you transfer money from one card to another. Of course, if you want to give five bucks to your friend it's faster and easier to just give him a five dollar bill... I still have mine. It says that my card still has $2 on it and it that every one of my last ten transactions was at Tim Hortons (the ubiquitous Canadian coffee shop).