glimpses of the future of money - by way of its past

January 17, 2021

For quite some time now, I've been fascinated with what we might broadly describe as "the future of money". Whether building solutions to help accelerate the flow of cash between banks and customers, or helping build new, smarter layers of infrastructure to make payments faster and more secure, I've had unique opportunities to get glimpses of what the future of various things we call "money" might look like. The design historian in me finds it almost as exciting to take the same kind of look in the opposite direction - to look at the multiple predecessors of these new systems and the ways in which, over time, people have stored, transmitted and used various definitions of money.

A personal favorite of mine is this portable currency container from 1931 - a device whose very design expresses many of the key principles of the architecture of financial systems that are still operational today. Bearing the imprint of a centralized agent of trust - a bank - this portable money container only has meaning within such a system. Because of its portability, it itself once represented the future of money - it extended that trust and its value beyond the physical boundaries of the bank itself.

As an interface between a bank client and a centralized banking system, the device is very familiar to us. Setting aside their physical differences and uses, it is something like the distant ancestor of the mobile UI that still sits between us and the funds that a centralized system holds. It is at once related to and the opposite of a digital wallet - not only because its existence is purely physical, for example, but also because it depends entirely on a centralized trust system to retain any meaning that translates into value.

Its design implements a security standard - a metal lock - that seems awfully fragile and primitive to us. At the same time, it is not too conceptually different to how access to currency is still guarded today in many (too many!) financial systems. It has one "lock" and one "key", not unlike a single password guards access to your funds stored somewhere, all by itself, if multiple other security devices are not in play.

The architecture of our financial systems has, of course, evolved way past many of these principles, but not as far as we might think in some respects. Hence, this fragment of a "legacy system" that is with us in more ways than one still has something to teach us about what might be coming ahead in the journey.