In the early 90s I lived in Guelph, Canada. We were one of a couple of pilot cities for Mondex, a stored value card system that I think was owned by MasterCard.

In the early 90s I lived in Guelph, Canada. We were one of a couple of pilot cities for Mondex, a stored value card system that I think was owned by MasterCard. The city got a bunch of funding to get Mondex working everywhere from parking meters to buses, payphones, and of course private businesses. Everyone who wanted one was sent a Mondex card and a portable card reader which looked like a small calculator. You could put your card in it and press your thumb on a button to make the display show your balance. That little device allowed you to transfer money between cards if I recall, but I never figured out how. You could also see your past transactions and set a card PIN. One of the cooler things Mondex could do was an early form of online banking. Some households were issued special phones from Bell Canada that looked like regular Nortel phones with a yellow card reader attached to the side and a much larger screen. You could log in to your bank directly from the phone and transfer money out of your account into the card. You could also use an ATM if you didn't have the phone. It was a pretty neat technology but at just around the same time Interac debit payments really started to take off and people were much happier to have a card linked to their accounts rather than a card with a balance you could lose. The payments were also pretty slow, so anyone paying for the bus slowed the line down. I still have my card and reader somewhere and I think it has a few dollars left on it. The last time I looked, many years ago, the only transactions that showed up on the reader were coffee purchases at Tim Hortons.