I spoke at the Brookings Institute Conference on the Future of Payments. Ken Chenault was the lead speaker and used the opportunity to celebrate American Express’s 50th anniversary in the card business. They started their charge card n 1958. They almost sold it a few years later to Diners Club but luckily for Amex the Justice Department thought that would be anticompetitive. Everyone agreed that the payments business has a bright future, though I’m not sure there was agreement on what that future was. But I digress.

Ken pointed out with a large fraction of payments being made with cash and check still and with the explosive growth of the “we-only-take cards” online world, that one shouldn’t write off the cards business as a mature business. I couldn’t agree more. Ken and a couple of other speakers seemed to be kind of sensitive to referring to cards as a commodity business. I’m a bit more dubious about this one. Sure, there are lots of bells and whistles on cards, and Amex definitely has the premium brands, but the struggle that issuers make in trying to make themselves different from each other, really shows that offering cards that allow people to buy and borrow is pretty much something that lots of issuers can do equally well.

Those of you looking for my take will need to wait until next week for the release of a video presentation of my speech. As a preview I told the audience that if they want to see where change will come from in payments they need to look at the data, look at the cloud, and look in their hands.

By the way, Hank Paulson was supposed to have ended the program. He sent a substitute since he was apparently too busy nailing down the loan agreement with AIG.