Picture this: It’s 9 PM on a Friday night at the beginning of a long holiday weekend, and you’re out with friends for a night on the town to celebrate the end of a stressful week. You’re feeling magnanimous and offer to pick up the tab, to your friends’ great delight. You reach for your

Debit cards are commonplace today, but they’re a relatively new tool in the banking industry. Although the very first debit card was used in the 1970s, the cards did not have widespread acceptance until the 1990s. It wasn’t until 1998 that the number of debit card transactions outnumbered the number of checks used for purchases.