Many of the most important advances in EPOS till systems were initially spearheaded by the rapid rise and eventual ubiquity of a new type of payment that necessitated an advanced, digital approach to managing money.

The concept of credit had been implemented on the local level for centuries before the credit card was formalised, with many stores allowing customers to buy stuff on store credit and pay for it later.

Eventually, these systems would start to get formalised in the form of “charge coins” and the Charga-Plate, which were in practice store credit systems but replaced the arduous filling out of sales slips with a coin that could be stamped onto the slip.

This, in turn, led to the Air Travel Card, the world’s internationally valid charge card, albeit one that could only be used to buy plane tickets, which led the way for a wave of experiments before an event that has since been described in financial circles as “The First Supper”.

The first independent credit card in the world has been credited to an ill-fated meal at the Majors Cabin Grill restaurant in 1949. Frank McNamara, head of the Hamilton Credit Corporation was dining with department store magnate Alfred Bloomingdale and his attorney Ralph Sneider.

After a conversation about a customer who had borrowed money to pay back debts he had accrued to department stores by allowing neighbours to borrow money from him, Mr McNamara went to pay for his meal only to find that he had forgotten his wallet, requiring him to call his wife to bring some cash to the restaurant.

Vowing never to have this happen again, he developed a credit card concept that could be used at multiple locations with the card handler acting as a middleman between customers and companies.

This led to the development of the Diners Club, the first-ever credit card that distributed UK cards in 1962, a year before the first American Express card in the UK and four years before the first major British credit card company, Barclaycard, developed a monopoly from 1966 until 1972.