At the dawn of history people paid for what they needed using barter. Slowly certain goods took on additional, attributed value - salt, for one, and then gold. Eventually merchants invented letters of credit and governments invented money. Soon cheques became common.
Then, at a dizzyingly accelerating pace, came an ever-expanding array of ways to pay for things: credit cards, debit cards, internet banking, PayPal, "smart" cards, tap-card technology, mobile banking … the list keeps growing. Across Africa today, for example, millions who live where there is no bank nearby routinely use their mobile phones as their banks, receiving and sending payments through "mobile money" services known as M-Pesa, after the Swahili word for money.
Now another innovation, being introduced to the UAE through Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, takes the step of doing away with the phone or card altogether. Once the system is established, a user will be able to make small purchases just by punching 16 digits into a merchant's terminal: his phone number and a secret six-digit personal identification code.
It sounds terrifically promising, but we hope everyone involved will take the time to make sure they get this right. Banking convenience is an enormous advantage in daily life, but today everyone knows someone who has been stung by credit fraud of one kind or another.
In practice it is the world's banks which bear most of the burden of credit fraud: if consumers were left on the hook for the consequences of data theft or card theft, the world would rapidly abandon easy consumer credit. So the banks, even more than governments or consumers, have a stake in making each new credit product as foolproof and fraud-proof as possible.
If ADCB - and, perhaps soon, its rivals - are confident about security, the system could rapidly become a winner. ADCB hopes to sign up 300,000 users by the end of this year. That may be a challenge until it can also sign up a lot of merchants equipped with the technology to accept the new form of payment.
But history should make the bankers optimistic, and the early-adopter consumers who love innovations like this eager. There's always a market for convenient credit.
Global state-owned investor ranking by size
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United States
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China
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UAE
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Japan
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Norway
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Canada
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Singapore
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Australia
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Saudi Arabia
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South Korea
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Attacks on Egypt’s long rooted Copts
Egypt’s Copts belong to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, with Mark the Evangelist credited with founding their church around 300 AD. Orthodox Christians account for the overwhelming majority of Christians in Egypt, with the rest mainly made up of Greek Orthodox, Catholics and Anglicans.
The community accounts for some 10 per cent of Egypt’s 100 million people, with the largest concentrations of Christians found in Cairo, Alexandria and the provinces of Minya and Assiut south of Cairo.
Egypt’s Christians have had a somewhat turbulent history in the Muslim majority Arab nation, with the community occasionally suffering outright persecution but generally living in peace with their Muslim compatriots. But radical Muslims who have first emerged in the 1970s have whipped up anti-Christian sentiments, something that has, in turn, led to an upsurge in attacks against their places of worship, church-linked facilities as well as their businesses and homes.
More recently, ISIS has vowed to go after the Christians, claiming responsibility for a series of attacks against churches packed with worshippers starting December 2016.
The discrimination many Christians complain about and the shift towards religious conservatism by many Egyptian Muslims over the last 50 years have forced hundreds of thousands of Christians to migrate, starting new lives in growing communities in places as far afield as Australia, Canada and the United States.
Here is a look at major attacks against Egypt's Coptic Christians in recent years:
November 2: Masked gunmen riding pickup trucks opened fire on three buses carrying pilgrims to the remote desert monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor south of Cairo, killing 7 and wounding about 20. IS claimed responsibility for the attack.
May 26, 2017: Masked militants riding in three all-terrain cars open fire on a bus carrying pilgrims on their way to the Monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor, killing 29 and wounding 22. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.
April 2017: Twin attacks by suicide bombers hit churches in the coastal city of Alexandria and the Nile Delta city of Tanta. At least 43 people are killed and scores of worshippers injured in the Palm Sunday attack, which narrowly missed a ceremony presided over by Pope Tawadros II, spiritual leader of Egypt Orthodox Copts, in Alexandria's St. Mark's Cathedral. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks.
February 2017: Hundreds of Egyptian Christians flee their homes in the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula, fearing attacks by ISIS. The group's North Sinai affiliate had killed at least seven Coptic Christians in the restive peninsula in less than a month.
December 2016: A bombing at a chapel adjacent to Egypt's main Coptic Christian cathedral in Cairo kills 30 people and wounds dozens during Sunday Mass in one of the deadliest attacks carried out against the religious minority in recent memory. ISIS claimed responsibility.
July 2016: Pope Tawadros II says that since 2013 there were 37 sectarian attacks on Christians in Egypt, nearly one incident a month. A Muslim mob stabs to death a 27-year-old Coptic Christian man, Fam Khalaf, in the central city of Minya over a personal feud.
May 2016: A Muslim mob ransacks and torches seven Christian homes in Minya after rumours spread that a Christian man had an affair with a Muslim woman. The elderly mother of the Christian man was stripped naked and dragged through a street by the mob.
New Year's Eve 2011: A bomb explodes in a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria as worshippers leave after a midnight mass, killing more than 20 people.
