“Go ahead, leave your wallet at home,” Bank Zero told me one morning a few weeks back, announcing that customers could use its cards with Apple Pay.
I really wish I could leave my wallet behind. I have tried a variety of ways to not carry a small card holder because all I have in it is my driver’s licence. Everything else I use in my day-to-day life is digital.
I’m the most anticipatory of Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber’s announced plans to make our IDs go digital. It’s not just that I want a minimalistic approach to what I have to carry in my pockets, but that it enables a whole new world for us.
Admittedly, a world fraught with dangers – it’s bad enough how easily criminals seem to get legitimate identity documents and passports, and a digital version of our ID wouldn’t abolish those risks.
But this is the way of the future, and verifying our digital identities will become as commonplace as verifying a credit card transaction in your banking app. Or, potentially, as easy as opening up Apple Pay. Or Samsung Pay or Google Pay. I’m a regular user of VodaPay, initially because I am a Vodacom customer and I try to try out everything, but now because of easy it is to buy prepaid electricity.
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Having a good user experience is an important part of this digital ecosystem we’re all moving into. That’s a big part of the reason that OpenAI paid $6.4 billion for Apple design supremo Jony Ive’s one-year-old startup, called io.
As OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a Bloomberg interview: “We have not yet figured out what the equivalent of the graphical user interface is going to be, but we will.”
Ive thinks AI offers “very new ways” to interact with a new range of technology, but is conscious that “the phone, as it currently is, is a remarkable general-purpose device.”
While Altman and Ive think about what the next great gadget will be, the rest of us will just be happy to use our phones to pay for everything. And hopefully one day, as our ID too.
