What about if we could reverse the way credit cards work, so instead of a company taking money from me I give the money to them; instead of supplying them my cc number, they supply me with their credentials and I transfer the money and then they verify the transaction has taken place.

I'm not sure about US or European banking, but in Australia we have three methods that work like this - BPay, direct deposit and cash/cheque. BPay is a company that sits in the middle and is, I gather, not financially viable for smaller companies, a direct deposit can take days to appear, and cash is not that great for online transactions.

You described a corporate purchasing card. Purchasing cards are designed to let you manage on-the-fly all kinds of spending parameters e.g. "no hotels in zip code 10001 Friday through Sunday." You'll pay more for these programs of course.

Here's an idea: a card with a magnetic strip on each of its 4 (or 6 or 8) edges. Now instead of carrying multiple cards you carry just one. If you use both sides of the card, you could fit 16 mag strips on an octagonal card.

Thanks for the info. I think "purchasing cards" should be for everybody, not only for large companies. And the concept could be applied for checks, money wires, debit cards, paypal, etc.

Here in my country, banks make a large profit out of fraud, albeit indirectly. They offer fraud insurance. They purchase the insurance from someone else for about USD 1/month, and sell it to you for USD 6/month. Of course most people never get to claim anything. Each time there's anything related to credit card fraud on the news, banks get more people buying their insurance (here banks are the only credit card-issuing institutions). If banks offered a cheaper/free way to reduce or eliminate fraud, they would also kill their insurance business.

About the multiple strips cards: In Japan they're already using NFC cards with internal chips that can store several different cards information. The info is encrypted so that only certain authorized card readers may read corresponding card info. Checkout: http://www.sony.net/Products/felica/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeliCa

why a magstripe, just a simple chip and a confirmation dialog on the reader would do the same trick. Set one card as the default for old style equipment and you're backwards compatible.

This is a great idea. I wonder if there's a way to do this through your own offered credit/debit card, instead of having to work with the likes of visa, large banks, or payment processors.