50 years ago, on March 25, 1974, a French inventor named Roland Moreno filed the first patent for an “electronic memory’ for banking use. The smart card, which for 50 years has offered many uses other than payment services, is undeniably one of the greatest successes of global high-tech and the digital economy.
In the space of 50 years, hundreds of billions of smart cards have been distributed. If today they integrate contactless, their evolution towards total dematerialization seems inevitable.