There's a couple of reasons why this article is interesting, but relatively naive. It won't work because companies WANT your information, in order to extend th

There's a couple of reasons why this article is interesting, but relatively naive. It won't work because companies WANT your information, in order to extend their marketing capabilities to you. Also, it turns Mastercard/VISA into a consumer-facing business, which is it not currently. And I'm pretty sure they're happy only dealing with merchants. There was a good article a couple of years ago on why Google Payments was having such a hard time competing against Paypal, and the reason was customer service. Paypal spent more on customer service than Google did (at the time, not sure about now) and this allowed the overall customer service to be better. When you have regular people in the mix, it makes business much, much harder, and I'm pretty sure the credit card companies don't want to deal with that BS. So they're perfectly fine letting others deal with customers directly. If they shifted to the system that the author described, all of the load would be on Mastercard/VISA, including things like refunds, etc, and that's not exactly a high-margin business. So, it's a nice thought, but having a single point of service/privacy/failure likely won't happen with the status quo, unless a completely new merchant shows up willing to take on everything associated with payments.