These changes, too, have not occurred in a straightforward, linear fashion, owing unquestionably but not solely to discontinuities in geopolitical equilibria. In the economic field, recurrent financial crises have struck single countries and regions, ultimately producing the extremely severe global crisis of which we still face the legacies. The world economy has gone through a recession every decade since the 1960s.
That is one reason why payment cards are so popular – because most of the need for manual entry is removed. The need to know a recipient’s account details is another challenge for many payment systems. One of our oldest payment methods – the cheque – deals with that by only requiring the recipient’s name, with the recipient doing the rest.