It's now drastically easier for retailers to sell goods on credit, and it's vastly easier for customers to pay electronically. 10-15 years ago, you couldn't swipe your ATM/credit card at the grocery store.
On the flip side, credit cards are currently riddled with serious, yet solvable security problems. Identity theft is one. ATM skimmers is another. There are also pretty grim privacy implications to the way things work. Finally, banks used to do some rather ridiculous things with penalty rates and fees until they were prohibited by law.
This system probably did people some good in the 90s, but right now it seems inefficient and dated. I believe that with modern technologies it's definitely possible to create something much better.
The existence of a technical solution to a security problem doesn't mean that it gets implemented in practice. Sure the security issues are theoretically solvable, but that means nothing when you're talking about a system with hundrads of millions of users. Aside from issues of magnitude, the financial incentives are all wrong if the goal is to have credit card companies implement the security solutions we would like. Currently financial instituions implement whatever security solution is financially optimal, taking into account the cost of a breach (reputation, customer satisfaction, impact of future sales, etc) and the cost of implementing the security measures. If you want something more than what the credit card companies are already doing, you need to lobby for increased regulation or financial incentives in terms of fines.
Very true, but let's not belittle their innovations due to the problems that came with them. All new technologies will introduce unintended consequences in spite of the efforts of the inventors and innovators to provide something good. Cars were lauded as a clean invention because it stopped horses from leaving their crap on the roads. Nobody realized that air quality would suffer. All technologies and innovations will have unintended consequences that come out of left field and nobody would have predicted. Who at the early stages seriously thought that they'd cause people to have email overload and issues with spam from the invention of email? They were creating a new communication tool, like the phone, but in many ways more flexible and better.
On the flip side, credit cards are currently riddled with serious, yet solvable security problems. Identity theft is one. ATM skimmers is another. There are also pretty grim privacy implications to the way things work. Finally, banks used to do some rather ridiculous things with penalty rates and fees until they were prohibited by law.
This system probably did people some good in the 90s, but right now it seems inefficient and dated. I believe that with modern technologies it's definitely possible to create something much better.