Due caution in new dial-a-dirham plan

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.