Forgetting the existance of your pocket money??

Japanese consumers are familiar with point card system. Recently I noticed that including these point cards or the CO2 emmission trade, intangible currencies are beginning to show its value since last year or so.

There are many types of point card utilities. In other words, point system varies depending on the publishing company. Forexample, "T Point" is given every 100yen spent at TSUTAYA, Family Mart or Book off. "ANA's Milage" could be exchanged into Yamada Denki points. Moreover, on web sites such as "G Point", you can exchange points into companies that do not affiliate or cooperate.

I presume that these points will be used in exchange rate bases in the future.　Financial agency and Ministry of economic agency are now discussing on this topic, but how are they going to interpret bancrupcy and change of the point system without any warnings? From the company's view, the point system is just an additional gift to customers. It is nothing to be controled under law. Nevertheless, if this culture grows into a global business, "prize ticket" concept must be reconsidered. For companies, the amount points that are not yet used, are appropriated as sales promotion cost. Points work as currency but it can also be forgotten that it does actually work like that. I bet hardly anyone forget the usage of notes or coins. Here is an interesting case: Card published by Starbucks can not gain points everytime you drink coffee, so it just work as a cash card. However on the annual report in 2007, the expired card had a value of little less than a hundred milion yen all together.

I guess the point card (Electronic money) market in the future can be expected by studying the present world wide financial system.