mart card. NFC-enabled contactless smart cards are typically close-coupled applications in which the two devices (the reader and the smart card) are either touching or within a few millimetres of each other hence the description 'near-field communication'. The technology and the software associated with the technology is covered in Chapter 19, but many of us already use NFC enables devices to pay for bus and train journeys or going through passport control. 11.4 Commercial Issues - The End of the Cheque Book? Legislation can also have an impact on adoption. The Payments Council in the UK9 for example decided in June 2009 that cheque guarantee cards would no longer be valid in the UK from 30 June 2011, the start of a process to abolishing cheques introduced in Britain 700 years ago. This was justified on the basis that there had been a 65% decline in the use of guaranteed cheques over the previous five years. Only 7% of the one million cheques written in 2010 were guaranteed. The average transaction value per cheque was £392 but 88% of all cards had guarantee of £100 or less. The announcement was packaged with a plan 10 to develop a mobile /http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/Weather/story?id=4806331&page=1 7 8 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/4136289.stm. 9 http://www.paymentscouncil.org.uk/media_centre/press_releases/-/page/1560/ 10 http://www.payyourway.org.uk/. Transaction-Centric Software payments plan using mobile phones - a good example of how slowly the regulatory process moves in the financial services sector (sometimes for good reason). The point to make is that the technology and engineering issues are relatively straightforward to address, the commercial issues are more complex. Similarly there was no technical reason why phones cannot replace passports but the regulatory and political barriers to this would be substantial. Essentially, as the value of a transaction increases the identification and security associated with that transaction should increase as well. Conversely, as the value of a transaction