X Reality & Money

The future is not just cashless, but cardless. And that future is not too distant.

We have seen technology evolve faster in the past decade than the preceding century or too. This pace of evolutionary acceleration is going to continue for most decades of the 21st century. And you do not even need a Professional Futurist to tell you that.

A New Reality

While for much of the 2010s, we have seen the gradual imminent advent of Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality, the 2020s will be a zenith in the human story, where technologies that were either hypothetical or fantasy till the year 2000 will converge for a dynamic synergistic result; Extended Reality, otherwise known as X Reality, or XR for short.

X Reality will enable us through the convergence of critical ingredients such as the Internet of Things, AR/VR/MR, Haptics, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Brain Computer Interface, to transcend the divides of physical and virtual, biological and non-biological, seamlessly and effortlessly. English teachers will have to forgive me for the sentencing here, but that is how things will be with X Reality. You can't describe it any other way.

And as with everything else, X Reality, will change, how money works, or how we deal with it.

Transactions

You walk into a store. You are presented a pair of shoes matching your specific requirements in mind. You try them on. You like them. You walk out wearing them, and you go home. There will be no mall security running after you, nor anyone calling the police, for walking out like that, without making a payment at the cashier's counter. The moment you walk out of the store, with those shoes on, the price, will be automatically deducted from your bank account.

No cards. No cash. No pin number. No tapping the smartphone. No queue. No password. No signature. You will be, the access to your bank account. You will be the password and pin number. Payment and checkout will be automatic. You will just need wearable technology on you to facilitate this convenience, while the retailer will need sensors, scanners and cameras. The bank account however, will not be linked or connected to what you'll be wearing, but rather, to you.

Business

A New Yorker who speaks only English meets someone from Warsaw who only speaks Polish, in the setting of Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, without either party leaving home, in a simulated virtual environment, and are able to hear each other, in the respective languages they understand, through automatic live translation, engage in a productive discussion. That leads to an agreement, and the two parties shake hands on a deal. The agreement requires one party to make a payment to the other. With that handshake within the simulated virtual setting of a third country, the amount that needs to be paid, is instantly transferred from the bank account of the payer, to the bank account of the payee, across currencies and geographies.

No cheques. No drafts. No online login. No bank queue. No processing time. The result of Brain Computer Interface, Haptics, Virtual Reality, Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and Banking, all coming together.

No worries about loss of currency fluctuation or defaults on payments or fraud.

Read also: The Real Future of FinTech: This May Shock & Scare You!

It is not Simple, It is not Easy, It is Convergence

Nothing happens in a silo. That is one of the first rules of Futures Studies. Folks who do not understand convergences tend to jump to conclusions like "It is not that easy" or "It is not as simple as you think". Putting together a laptop is not easy, nor a smartphone. If you are reading this, and you are not using a tablet, you like are using a laptop or a smartphone. All these things began somewhere, across different verticals, and then came about to manifest, with convergences taking place.

The state of technological evolution today, is that everything is headed towards one total convergence, when every object you can put a chip in is connected in a global web, along with every person and organisation.

The massive stumbling blocks here, are not technological. They are human. Such stumbling blocks have always been overcome in human history. What were they saying about putting lives out on the internet? Are they seeing Facebook today? Evolution in human behaviour, mindsets, societies and the internet, all converged. And as the story continues, resistance, is futile.

Harish Shah is Singapore's first local born Professional Futurist and a Management Strategy Consultant. He runs Stratserv Consultancy. His areas of consulting and Keynote Topics include EmTech, Industry 4.0, HR, Digital Transformation, Product Development, X Reality, Marketing, Strategic Foresight, Systems Thinking and Organisational Future Proofing.