Accounting and Financial Management Research Seminar – Dr Gordon Mayze
Title: The (Dis)Orderly Emergence of the UK Debit Card at the Dawn of the Digital Economy in the 1970s-1980s
Date: 12 March 2025
Time: 14:00 – 15:00
Venue: NUBS.2.08
If you would like to attend, please register using the following link:
Speaker:
Dr Gordon Mayze is qualified as a Chartered Accountant with KPMG and spent two decades in industry, including a decade at Lloyds Banking Group, managing multi-disciplinary teams across Group Strategy and planning, Financial reporting as well as working on M&A, Basel III and ring-fencing reforms, and was on Lloyds executive leadership development programme. In 2011, Gordon completed an MBA at the University of Manchester and moved into academia after completing his doctoral thesis in 2022, also at the University of Manchester. Gordon’s research interests are multi-disciplinary, covering both accounting and finance, with a particular interest in Financialization – with a focus on critical perspectives of shareholder value, post-crisis banking reform, and historical studies of finance and banking crises.
Abstract:
The presentation is based on the first planned journal article submission of several proposed outputs crossing different disciplines. The introduction of the debit card established the foundations for the shift towards an increasingly cashless society by enabling the transfer of monetary balances by on-the-spot transactions through online, real-time, electronic networks. Although debit cards were an aspiration during the 1960s, it was not until the mid-1970s when the first promising attempts emerged in the USA (Stearns, 2011), yet these attempts failed to gain traction. This presentation explores the case of the UK, by drawing on extensive archival research undertaken at all the UK clearing banks and reveals collaborative efforts between banks to launch a debit card began as early as the 1970s which was supported by UK Government and the Bank of England. However, this collaborative effort collapsed, sparked by Barclays decision to go it alone in an attempt to replicate the success in the 1960s when it launched the Barclaycard credit card separately to the other UK clearing banks. However, while Barclays successfully launched the first UK Debit Card in 1987 (named ‘Connect’) and was a monopoly provider for a period of around a year, the launch was not without setbacks and problems, and Barclays failed to gain ‘first mover advantage’ – meanwhile, relations with rival banks and Retailers became acrimonious, and the intervention of the competition regulator was deemed necessary to restore order. The presentation therefore examines an important step in the construction of UK financial market infrastructures and specifically retail payment systems and considers how the growing complexity of these infrastructures becomes a barrier to entry – that at the same time requires increasing collaboration amongst incumbents. The findings also present a critical perspective of existing theories of financial innovation, as our research reveals a much more complex and nuanced set of events than theories such as demand and supply, two-sided platforms, or behavioural economics propose. While the technology has evolved in the decades which followed, the findings therefore have relevance and learnings in context of current day discussions around the development of payment infrastructures and financial technology innovations more generally.