Cash may soon be a thing of the past in Spain, as the clearing and savings banks launch a wave of electronic cash cards for use on the bus, in public phone booths, at newspaper kiosks, bakeries and bars. Spain’s development of this technology, which began with savings bank La Caixa’s pilot project using a Bull CP8 TB-100 card on the campus of the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 1994. Experts believe that the coming months will see a boom in the use of these cards, which normally hold up to $200 and cut the average cash transaction (without exact change) from 30 seconds down to five seconds. Compagnie des Machines Bull SA, whose Spanish subsidiary owns 72% of Barcelona-based Telesincro SA, the firm that has produced the lion’s share of the payment terminals for Spain, calculates that maximum coverage of the Spanish market would be achieved with 700,000 terminals and more than 30m cash cards. At present 265,000 cards have been issued by savings banks La Caixa (170,000), Caja Cataluna (82,000) and Caja de Pamplona, Caja de Girona and Caja de La Rioja (13,000 between them), while there are 22,000 businesses and 13,000 public telephones currently offering this payment facility. La Caixa offers its cash card free to its cus tomers, while Caja Cataluna’s version doubles up as a charge card. The number of cash cards in circulation is expected to rise to 2m in a matter of months, with several banks and savings banks poised to jump on the bandwagon. First off the mark will be Cajamadrid, which has planned investment of $24m to launch some 450,000 cards. Director of the savings bank’s Automatic Banking division, Jose Andres Fernandez, observed that Spain was the ideal place for such cards due to the infinite and infuriating variety of coins of low denominations. Meanwhile Banco Sabadell will offer a cash card that can be loaded from the holder’s home using a device that links up to a telephone on which the bank’s number is then dialed. Although the financial sector forecasts that the new cards will shift in the region of $80m, dissenting voices point to the failure of the cash card pilot trial at the recent Atlanta Olympics and warn of the low profit margins involved in these electronic transactions.
