Old Content:

A Paperless Society: An Easy Place to Start

June 6, 2009 by Kyle Brady
Tags: Credit Cards, Debit Cards, Digital, Future, Money, Paperless Society, Receipts, Technology
As required by the FTC, a Full Disclosure is available - this piece adheres to the Code of Ethics

---

Everyone in the tech world dreams of a day when we're a truly "paperless society" - archives are purely digital, there are no warehouses of file boxes, and memos are never printed.  Obviously, we haven't reached this (and may never), but PDFs, email, and assorted other digital tools have helped us come a long way: consider the effect email has had on regular mail (aka "post"), and without much afterthought by those using it.

But to reach such a paperless society, do we really need to develop more tools?  The answer is obviously yes, but what if a few tweaks to already-existing technology allowed us a step closer?

The best place to start are credit/debit card receipts.

After you get your daily (or not-so-daily) latte from Starbucks, or coffee from Dunkin Donuts, do you keep the receipt?  Be honest - most of the time they'll ask if you want a copy, and click an option to not print one for you.  Now consider all the other trivial expenses of life... most purchases don't require you to keep the receipt for warranty purposes.  Stamps, a tank of gas, movie tickets, etc. are perfect examples.

Additionally, receipts aren't required for tracking purposes, because of the pervasiveness of online banking.  I'm assuming that most people use online banking, at least to some degree, which isn't a bad assumption - if you didn't have the option a year ago, your bank probably got bought by someone that provides it.

If your bank is anything greater than a one-off podunk local bank, they have alot of information on you - email is just one of many personal data items.  Online banking takes this one step further, and may have information like a cell phone number... Bank of America has mine as a security confirmation tool via a text-message confirmation code system.

Using an online system, a user could specify a set of rules (or use a default set) that defines when they want receipts:  price floors, individual retailers, purchase location, etc.  Then, at the time of transaction, the bank associated with the card receives the request, and returns data to the retailer about receipt printing, most likely saying "no receipt".  An email could be sent to the user with the purchase data (specified beforehand), or kept in a receipt archive downloadable from the bank.

This is merely inserting a small bit of functionality into technology that already exists and is relatively mature - a set of online options, an added return value to the retailer, and maybe an email sent.  I'm not suggesting a tech revolution here.

It could be the beginning of a truly paperless society.  I don't have exact numbers, but I would imagine not printing 75% of the modern world's receipts would be a huge paper savings - and alot of trees.

Who knows what would follow?  Once the public warms to the idea of not worrying about receipts, perhaps paper currency itself can be phased out (saving not only many trees, but billions of dollars a year).  Or maybe train/metro/bus/lightrail/subway tickets via cellphones.

I'm all for this, whatever follows.

Old Content posts are leftovers from a less structured, less civilzed era that are kept for posterity.
Kyle can be found on Twitter and MySpace, or reached via email.