The future of money: the spread of e-money Many innovations to existing payment systems have been successful, but the question remains as to how e-money, a fundamentally new payment system, has fared. As mentioned earlier, most types of e-money take one of two forms: stored value cards and network e-money.
Initially, many believed that these innovations would allow more retail and smaller-value transactions to be made electronically, paralleling the move to electronic funds transfer for large-value payments. Of course, substantial investments were needed to provide the infrastructure for using these types of payment devices and to ensure that enough consumers and merchants would use them to make the investments worthwhile.