The 10 Inventions That Most Changed Retail Banking

Here are some of the influential technologies and inventions which have each in their own way revolutionised the retail banking business in the last 1000 years. Money, guarantees and loans have been around for the millennium. I looked for something new, and didn't really see any change between the Crusades and and the 19th century. The first entry could also be argued to have existed then too.

1. 1830's  Credit Bureaus -  Lewis Tappan
               1937 before broad adoption, Credit-scoring invented in 1956 by Bill Fair and
               Earl Isaac
               
2. 1918   Electronic Money - Federal Reserve transmitted remittances internally by telegraph.                     
3. 1939   The Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) - Luther George Simjian & later by
              Don Wetzel, Tom Barnes and George Chastain who also patented ATM cards.

4. 1950   The Credit Card - 1930's oil companies used them. 1950 Frank McNamara started
              Diners and Amex followed in 1958 with general use.

5. 1961   Spreadsheets - Professor Richard Mattessich pioneered the development of
              computerized speadsheets.

6. 1964   Computers for banks - IBM System 360 low cost, modular and powerful
              found widespread use, not the first computer but most influential to banking.
             
    1968   Memory Card - Helmut Gröttrup and Jürgen Dethloff, two German rocket
              scientists invented an automated chip card memory cardwhich was first used for
              phone cards in France by Telecarte on 1983 and Chip and PIN cards and first
              deployed for banking 1992.   

    1960's  RFID Tags - Charles Walton patented the first practical RFID devices which
               combined with chips and memory are the forerunners if todays RFID Smart cards.
               In 2004 he patented a "Proximity card with incorporated PIN code protection.”
 
7. 1970   POS NCR retail point of sale equipment interfaced with banks by around 1973.

8. 1973   Mobile Phone - Dr Martin Cooper
              Customers who owned mobiles called their banks from about 1985 but automated
              Mobile Banking only really began gaining acceptance in 2007.

    1974   Microprocessor Card - Roland Moreno

    1978   The Smart Card - Michel Ugon invented the micro-processor and memory in one chip
              2006 before much penetration.

    1978   The PC Spreadsheet - Dan Bricklin with Visicalc, used on  HP85 in 1970's,
              and 1 million Apples. Led to dominance in the personal computer with Excel 1989.
  
9. 1983   RSA Encryption - Public Key Encryption Algorithm by Rivest, Shamir, and Adelman
              1990 saw wide adoption on the internet and held it's ground for more than a decade.

I could only come up with 9. The other card developments are just variations of the original with new technological approaches and they haven't in themselves quite succeeded in revolutionising banking just yet.

It's interesting to note the delay in deployment of these technologies.

What do you think will be next on the list?

I think it will be whatever process binds all these technologies and their successors together into one seamless virtually instantaneous process.