Cashless Disney and the Mark of the Magic Band

[dieboy]

Big data has ways to link everything together. Take the Google/Mastercard deal that sold banking transaction data to google to help validate the worth of their adsense program.

You know that all those card transactions that take place at disney are initially accepted by them, and they know 'JOEDISNEYNUT' bought a coffee at 'x' stand at 'x' timestamp. So they can take that data and pair it with magic band information.

The sole way to not be digitally tracked, is to use cash. It is simply to resource consuming to track that.

 

[WEDwaydatamover]

RFID is nothing new at Disney. WDW has used fingerprint biometrics at the ticket turnstile since the early 2000's if not earlier.

During the 100 Years of Magic celebration people bought the RFID light up pins.

Remember Pal Mickey?
Now Magicbands.

It's creepy but convenient. I don't think that Disney is nefarious with its intentions but what about using and testing and tinkering with every possibly of RFID application in the world's largest guinea pig experiment.

Nearly a billion has been invested in this by Disney.

I wonder what $ they could make back selling future systems or information to outside companies or even governments.

And they make us love the tracking and data mining and are willing to pay for it too!

Brilliant!

 

[zurgandfriend]

In the future cash and credit cards will disappear. However, as long as there are old farts like me cash will still be an option. As is always the case, the older generation resists the technology of their children. I will admit that it is getting harder and I have had to yield to technology in regards to highway tolls & public parking. My family insisted I get a smartphone and when they text me I always reply why can’t you just call and speak to me instead? It drives them nuts, now you kids get off my lawn.

 

[TARDIS]

In my opinion I could definitely see this happening, not any time soon but maybe several decades in the future.

I work in banking and have seen a decline in not only cash transactions but in physical bank business. Most people prefer to do everything online and never step foot in their bank which is why so many branchless banks have popped up. With this mindset consumers in time will start to prefer this method in their everyday life and vacaction habits. For example Mobile food ordering and grocery pickup,all which is done online or in a app with a card is growing in popularity. That’s not too far from the “all inclusive”cashless Disney trip. People already pay for their food ahead of time with the dining plan, then they can prepay for souvenirs!

 

[thomas998]

In the future cash and credit cards will disappear. However, as long as there are old farts like me cash will still be an option. As is always the case, the older generation resists the technology of their children. I will admit that it is getting harder and I have had to yield to technology in regards to highway tolls & public parking. My family insisted I get a smartphone and when they text me I always reply why can’t you just call and speak to me instead? It drives them nuts, now you kids get off my lawn.

Trouble with a cashless society will be when there are computer glitches. Computers aren't perfect and when a glitch happens that wipes out someone's life savings it won't be pretty, even if it gets corrected. I don't do auto bill pay on any of my monthly bills because I know that their is a possibility that one of the businesses could have an error that took out 14000 dollars instead of 140.00 dollars from an account which could cause all sorts of other checks to bounce until it got straightened out. Well every business that had a check from you bound would hit you with a fee of 25 dollars or more.... so even if you go the original problem fixed it would still cost you countless fees to other merchants... Not worth the risk, no matter how many incentives businesses off to sign up for auto pay, because when you read the fine print of those agreements for auto pay the business doesn't accept any of the risk associated with them screwing up.

 

[Smiley/OCD]

In my opinion I could definitely see this happening, not any time soon but maybe several decades in the future.

I work in banking and have seen a decline in not only cash transactions but in physical bank business. Most people prefer to do everything online and never step foot in their bank which is why so many branchless banks have popped up. With this mindset consumers in time will start to prefer this method in their everyday life and vacaction habits. For example Mobile food ordering and grocery pickup,all which is done online or in a app with a card is growing in popularity. That’s not too far from the “all inclusive”cashless Disney trip. People already pay for their food ahead of time with the dining plan, then they can prepay for souvenirs!

I know, I know, I'm old fashioned and a dinosaur, but until a banking institution can guarantee me that my money is safe from a twentysomething in a third world country sitting at his terminal with cheetos all over the keyboard hacking into my computer, I'll go in the bank. The bank has assured me that online banking is as safe as in person banking, but when my checks don't clear and my mortgage check bounces because the account or the bank was hacked, that's all the ammo. I need to do it the old fashioned way...and NO, I don't use an ATM card. The banks will NOT waste any time accessing a fee for a service charge, but how long does it take to get your account cleared up?

 

[nickys]

Trouble with a cashless society will be when there are computer glitches. Computers aren't perfect and when a glitch happens that wipes out someone's life savings it won't be pretty, even if it gets corrected. I don't do auto bill pay on any of my monthly bills because I know that their is a possibility that one of the businesses could have an error that took out 14000 dollars instead of 140.00 dollars from an account which could cause all sorts of other checks to bounce until it got straightened out. Well every business that had a check from you bound would hit you with a fee of 25 dollars or more.... so even if you go the original problem fixed it would still cost you countless fees to other merchants... Not worth the risk, no matter how many incentives businesses off to sign up for auto pay, because when you read the fine print of those agreements for auto pay the business doesn't accept any of the risk associated with them screwing up.

Here in the U.K. we have the direct debit guarantee. The bank takes the responsibility and has to refund the money and any charges that were caused by the error.

In fact the whole thing is so relatively seamless, that the one time we did have a problem, we didn’t realise it until several months later. When we tried to remortgage with the same lender onto a new fixed rate, it showed up that we had one late payment in the last 12 months. That was enough to scupper our chances. When the lender checked, they found they had caused it. The payment date fell on a bank holiday, and policy is the payment gets taken the first working day after. Lender had tried to collect the day before the bank holiday, bank system had said “date incorrect, refuse”.

The bank’s system had worked as planned, saving us potentially from charges. Lender corrected their records and all was sorted.

 

[donsullivan]

Much of this dialog is forgetting that on any given day, more than half of all guests are not staying on Disney property and do not have access to the payment system afforded via the Magic Band linked to room charge accounts. If you walk through all of the practical implications of attempting this, there is a broad audience of guests for whom this just would not work.

Few people realize that Disney already takes all major forms of contactless payment and has since late 2014. Nearly every transaction I make whenever I visit is using Apple Pay. And since that service runs on an industry standard contactless payment platform it supports most of the other major US players in that space such as Google Pay (or whatever it's called right now) and Samsung Pay. That would allow anyone using any of those platforms to pay with their mobile phones. In my case, it's even more convenient because I just tap my Apple Watch to the payment terminal just the way I might with a MagicBand for payment. I do not see them getting into the business of managing a single payment method to be accepted at the resort; I see more people expanding to contactless payments instead as the next generation.

My general sense is that this method of contactless payment will continue to grow, and Disney will continue to embrace it. You're already seeing them adding options to use your Mobile Phone in place of a magic band for access to rooms and I expect that trend away from the Magic Band to continue in the coming years.

 

[Yellow Shoes]

Most people prefer to do everything online and never step foot in their bank which is why so many branchless banks have popped up.

Yes--I do as much of my banking as I can with the ATM. However, I needed to deposit The Coin Can and had to go into the bank. Ahead of me was another customer making a paper money cash deposit.
The teller reamed her out--"Why aren't you using the ATM for this?" As if it were a real inconvenience to take her money. (I am willing to bet it was a bad day for the teller. and no, my bank doesn't have a coin counter in the lobby)

When I was a kid, the bank gave me Tootsie Rolls when we went in. Those days are long gone......

 

[Goofyernmost]

Yes--I do as much of my banking as I can with the ATM. However, I needed to deposit The Coin Can and had to go into the bank. Ahead of me was another customer making a paper money cash deposit.
The teller reamed her out--"Why aren't you using the ATM for this?" As if it were a real inconvenience to take her money. (I am willing to bet it was a bad day for the teller. and no, my bank doesn't have a coin counter in the lobby)

When I was a kid, the bank gave me Tootsie Rolls when we went in. Those days are long gone......

They also used to give you 6% on the smallest of savings accounts. That was over 50 years ago. Yes, we all have more money now, but 6% is 6%, all numbers are relevant to the times. That's why they use %'s instead of set amounts. Banks are close to being a necessary evil and the only thing that keeps them afloat is the Government guarantees originated after the Great Depression. Although it is tough to see outwardly the difference between a Bank and a Credit Union... there are enough differences to capture whatever liquid assets I wish to maintain outside of investments. I have been messed with at every bank I ever did business with... not even once at my credit union.

 

[LUVofDIS]

but until a banking institution can guarantee me that my money is safe from a twentysomething in a third world country sitting at his terminal with cheetos all over the keyboard hacking into my computer,

I agree to a point with what you are saying, but most fraud occurs in peer to peer transactions. I had $7000 stolen from my bank account by an inside job. It wasn't worth suing according to a multiple of lawyers because I had to use a lawyer because it was a business account and they felt that at best I would end up paying the full amount for the case. My point is this wasn't done from a computer hack, it was done by an individual. They had video survalance, but the quality was so bad they couldn't make out the face, banks have all of this money but couldn't afford a HD video recorder. Also, twice was mentioned that who ever did the withdraw new where to stand so not to be seen clearly. Hmmm.

Much of this dialog is forgetting that on any given day, more than half of all guests are not staying on Disney property and do not have access to the payment system afforded via the Magic Band linked to room charge accounts. If you walk through all of the practical implications of attempting this, there is a broad audience of guests for whom this just would not work.

The MB system would need to be set up in a way that all guests could link a CC or cash account to the band, similar to Apple Pay or any of the other companies cashless systems.

 

[donsullivan]

......The MB system would need to be set up in a way that all guests could link a CC or cash account to the band, similar to Apple Pay or any of the other companies cashless systems.

I'm not sure I see where it makes sense for Disney to create all that infrastructure and financial liability, instead of just continuing and expanding support for the industry standard cashless payment systems. We are already seeing them heading in that direction with the ability to use your smartphone as your room key instead of a Magicband. Continuing in that direction over time will allow them to remove all the cost, overhead and waste of MagicBands across the property. It's not something that would happen overnight, but they are already heading in that direction with the room keys. Now that companies like Apple (most Android devices already did) have opened up access to the RFID in their devices, it seems that could eventually be an option to completely replace the functions of the Magicband with something many people already have in their pockets.

 

[nickys]

I agree to a point with what you are saying, but most fraud occurs in peer to peer transactions. I had $7000 stolen from my bank account by an inside job. It wasn't worth suing according to a multiple of lawyers because I had to use a lawyer because it was a business account and they felt that at best I would end up paying the full amount for the case. My point is this wasn't done from a computer hack, it was done by an individual. They had video survalance, but the quality was so bad they couldn't make out the face, banks have all of this money but couldn't afford a HD video recorder. Also, twice was mentioned that who ever did the withdraw new where to stand so not to be seen clearly. Hmmm.



The MB system would need to be set up in a way that all guests could link a CC or cash account to the band, similar to Apple Pay or any of the other companies cashless systems.

That last bit..... Nothing is linked to a band. The band accesses the MDE account, which in turn has everything linked to it. So anything “stored” is on MDE. So, first they need to consider if MDE can handle CCs being linked to them. At the moment, I believe the CC is registered at the resort, and isn’t stored on MDE. So MDE would need the facility to be able to be made secure and to store CC details if they want offsite guests to use magic band as payment. That in turn requires people to be convinced that MDE could ever be secure, which quite frankly would be all but impossible for those that know MDE, let alone first timers!

Which is why I don’t see this happening. I think @donsullivan has it right here, They will continue to encourage people to use other payment methods, but not switching everything to magic bands.

Can someone answer this question, I’m actually interested to know. If you use the FP kiosks and an RFID card in lieu of a magic band.... do you have to have an MDE account set up first?

Just wondering if Guest Services currently create MDE accounts for offsite guests who have never visited before.

 

[thomas998]

Here in the U.K. we have the direct debit guarantee. The bank takes the responsibility and has to refund the money and any charges that were caused by the error.

In fact the whole thing is so relatively seamless, that the one time we did have a problem, we didn’t realise it until several months later. When we tried to remortgage with the same lender onto a new fixed rate, it showed up that we had one late payment in the last 12 months. That was enough to scupper our chances. When the lender checked, they found they had caused it. The payment date fell on a bank holiday, and policy is the payment gets taken the first working day after. Lender had tried to collect the day before the bank holiday, bank system had said “date incorrect, refuse”.

The bank’s system had worked as planned, saving us potentially from charges. Lender corrected their records and all was sorted.

Doesn't work like that in the US. I've seen countless situations where someone check bounces because a bank screwed up and the banks will never reimburse the customers the money they got hit from an outside business. The banks will refund the overdraft fee that they add on to the customers account but that's all the bank will do when it screws up. God forbid you had an outside business mess up because in some banks you wouldn't just have the overdraft fee from the businesses that had checks bounce but would at some banks also get a fee from the bank for every bounced check. The whole banking system in the US is married to making money off fees from customers, so probably no chance the government over here will ever force the banks to do anything that might takeaway the fees they charge even if it was the banks fault to begin with.

 

[nickys]

Doesn't work like that in the US. I've seen countless situations where someone check bounces because a bank screwed up and the banks will never reimburse the customers the money they got hit from an outside business. The banks will refund the overdraft fee that they add on to the customers account but that's all the bank will do when it screws up. God forbid you had an outside business mess up because in some banks you wouldn't just have the overdraft fee from the businesses that had checks bounce but would at some banks also get a fee from the bank for every bounced check. The whole banking system in the US is married to making money off fees from customers, so probably no chance the government over here will ever force the banks to do anything that might takeaway the fees they charge even if it was the banks fault to begin with.

Exactly. So how are they going to persuade people that it’s safe to let MDE store their CC details? Would you?

I think the banks here agreed to set up this guarantee to help persuade people to go with automatic DDs for bills and things. Including of course for CCs, so it does benefit them. And clearly the banks’ systems have a failsafe, like in our case, to prevent errors.

Not that the banks are always in the clear! We have some spectacular melt-downs in their systems fairly frequently! But they do have to make good any resulting charges from bills not getting paid.

 

[thomas998]

Much of this dialog is forgetting that on any given day, more than half of all guests are not staying on Disney property and do not have access to the payment system afforded via the Magic Band linked to room charge accounts. If you walk through all of the practical implications of attempting this, there is a broad audience of guests for whom this just would not work.

Few people realize that Disney already takes all major forms of contactless payment and has since late 2014. Nearly every transaction I make whenever I visit is using Apple Pay. And since that service runs on an industry standard contactless payment platform it supports most of the other major US players in that space such as Google Pay (or whatever it's called right now) and Samsung Pay. That would allow anyone using any of those platforms to pay with their mobile phones. In my case, it's even more convenient because I just tap my Apple Watch to the payment terminal just the way I might with a MagicBand for payment. I do not see them getting into the business of managing a single payment method to be accepted at the resort; I see more people expanding to contactless payments instead as the next generation.

My general sense is that this method of contactless payment will continue to grow, and Disney will continue to embrace it. You're already seeing them adding options to use your Mobile Phone in place of a magic band for access to rooms and I expect that trend away from the Magic Band to continue in the coming years.

Of course there is one incentive to Disney to favor cash over the electronic payment... the add-on fee that credit card and Apple Pay hit them with. If I buy 100 dollars of Disney mouse ears for cash Disney gets 100 dollars... if I use a credit card or Apple pay then Disney doesn't get that full hundred dollars because they have to give between .8 and 2.7 percent of the sales to the credit card company supporting the card. Just assume an average 1.5% goes to Visa/Mastercard or whoever and Disney is losing quite a chunk of change just in fees each day. Sure you can argue that you have a lot of costs associated with handling cash, but when you are aleadying handling cash wouldn't it make more sense for Disney to want more cash and less electronic money where some company is skimming off 1.5 percent of everything you make for doing pretty much nothing?

 

[donsullivan]

Of course there is one incentive to Disney to favor cash over the electronic payment... the add-on fee that credit card and Apple Pay hit them with. If I buy 100 dollars of Disney mouse ears for cash Disney gets 100 dollars... if I use a credit card or Apple pay then Disney doesn't get that full hundred dollars because they have to give between .8 and 2.7 percent of the sales to the credit card company supporting the card. Just assume an average 1.5% goes to Visa/Mastercard or whoever and Disney is losing quite a chunk of change just in fees each day. Sure you can argue that you have a lot of costs associated with handling cash, but when you are aleadying handling cash wouldn't it make more sense for Disney to want more cash and less electronic money where some company is skimming off 1.5 percent of everything you make for doing pretty much nothing?

This whole concept was tried by massive retailers like Walmart, CVS, Best Buy, Target and more a couple of years ago (search for CurrentC) with the express goal of bypassing the credit card fees. It was an absolute and total failure and the company created to manage the whole thing for all these retailers has all but shut down. Many of those merchants including BestBuy and CVS are now accepting normal contactless payment services like ApplePay since this concept died. The only way to bypass the CC fees was to give the payment service direct access to bank accounts which consumers vetoed with a resounding NO.

EDIT: I just saw an update that the company started for this was shut down and the technology sold to Chase bank who use it for ChasePay.

 

[thomas998]

This whole concept was tried by massive retailers like Walmart, CVS, Best Buy, Target and more a couple of years ago (search for CurrentC) with the express goal of bypassing the credit card fees. It was an absolute and total failure and the company created to manage the whole thing for all these retailers has all but shut down. Many of those merchants including BestBuy and CVS are now accepting normal contactless payment services like ApplePay since this concept died. The only way to bypass the CC fees was to give the payment service direct access to bank accounts which consumers vetoed with a resounding NO.

EDIT: I just saw an update that the company started for this was shut down and the technology sold to Chase bank who use it for ChasePay.

True... of course the dirty little secret that lots of people don't know is that when credit cards were just starting out in this county the merchant started charging the customers for the 1.5% or whatever it happened to be add on fee directly to the customers... The banks realized it would keep people from using their bank card if the customers realized it would cost them more so they lobbied various state governments to pass laws that would effectively ban the practice of doing the add-on. Some state would get around it by offering a cash discount because in those states the only recourse they had for the credit card fees was to raise the prices across the board to cover the fees and then just give cash discounts to customers that didn't force the retail to hand over money to the banks. If it weren't for those lobbying efforts it is doubtful credit card would have caught on as they have.... I mean how many people would think the convenience of not carrying cash was worth paying 1 to 2 percent more for everything you buy.

 

[WEDwaydatamover]

It's amazing how many heads this post flew over. It's actually a slight bit concerning.

 

[ColinP29]

Valid points. But if they are staying on property that would be remedied by receiving the MB at the front desk of the resort at check in.

Everyone...well mostly every - international visitor is staying at a hotel, near Disney. Shipping the MB to the hotel for pickup at check in, or alternately - going to Guest Relations would also be an option. There is a way to do it.

I understand the mindset about using cash. But cruise lines do this today. Disney would be accepting cash or credit. You would just need to load it on to your MDE account....and then use your MB for the transaction at the Parks and Resort.

I'm neither for or against this. Honestly I'd lean against - slightly - due to privacy concerns. But I think Disney as a business would benefit by it.

I'm going to Orlando in 4 weeks from the UK. We have Disney tickets but won't actually collect them until we arrive at our first Disney Park. So we would have to collect our Ticket's and Magic Bands on the first morning, set them all up to link together with our Credit Cards as soon as we can and make sure they are all working. With two young kids this just isn't going to happen.