The other day I was thinking about a keynote address at a financial institution due to be delivered later in the year. I decided to cast my mind back to the birth of money, as we know it today. After all, I argued, a bank deals with money primarily, and so some background on money might prove useful to my audience.

I was quite struck by what I discovered, and, while most readers [at least from the financial community, if there be any!] would know more about this than myself, I bravely decided to share it with anyone who cares to read these lines. So, here are my findings.

For those of us forty and older, try and answer this question without thinking for too long - What comes to your mind when you think of money? The rustle of paper. Why? Because we grew up in an environment where money was symbolized by note printed on paper [and coins, for smaller denominations]. Yet, have you paused to think what our ancestors would have thought of this? They would have laughed their heads off. For them paper meant nothing. They were used to accepting and offering bales of cotton and bushels of corn.

During the agricultural era, money meant substance - goods that had value. This meant precious metals, like gold and silver, cloth and copper. Before literacy became widespread, paper had very limited use. Clearly, wealth had a very different dimension at that time.

Then the world began to get industrialized. With it came new and radical ideas about wealth. Around 1650, William Potter predicted that 'symbolic wealth would replace real wealth.' Barely four decades later the Americans printed money for the first time. This became necessary because they were forbidden by their British masters to mint gold or silver coins.

This shift represents one of the most stupendous and earth-shaking leaps of faith to confront humankind. Clearly, if people didn't repose faith in paper money, they would simply not accept it in lieu of rice and raisins, or fur and fruits. So paper money brought in a new phenomenon - trust between disparate people and distant societies. Thus the industrial age was dominated by paper money.

But an even more powerful and all-encompassing change was under formation. With the arrival of the information age, paper money is rapidly facing extinction. It is another artifact of the vanishing industrial past, like assembly lines and smokestacks. My grandchildren will likely have to take an educational tour of a museum to see and feel paper money. This will be true at least for the more developed economies.

Comprehending these tectonic shifts, Bank of America launched BankAmericard in the late sixties. This was the precursor of the VISA card, as we know it today. And as of a few months ago, VISA's products were created by 23,000 financial institutions and accepted by more than 200 countries and territories. 355 million people use those products to make 7.2 billion transactions exceeding $650 billion annually. This, by the way, is the largest single block of consumer purchasing power in the world economy.

These changes are so cataclysmic that the entire belief system of the human race has been transformed. What would a bank teller say to a man who walks in today with a million dollars in cash and asks to deposit it and transfer it to an account in another location? He would seat the person and discreetly call security and the cops. It is thus no longer possible, or even wise, to try and use traditional money in large quantities to change hands. If our ancestors were to turn up today, we would have to be forgiven for mistaking them for drug traffickers or tax evasion artists!

Boy, have things changed. Have you ever wondered how many people carry paper money in their wallets these days? They carry an assortment of plastic cards instead.

What is a plastic card anyway? It is the outcome of being able to move mountains of information - or knowledge - instantaneously across millions of miles. It connects buyers, middlemen, and sellers - most of who have never seen [and will never see] each other - in order to transact and trade. It is nothing but a symbol - a symbol that stores, receives, transmits, accepts, or rejects transactions based upon trust. Ultimately, the bedrock is trust. Such a powerful tool is not a mere symbol, it is a super symbol. In other words, the world is fast moving into the era of the super-symbolic economy.

The super-symbolic economy presents several new challenges and opportunities. For instance, it diversifies money. Alvin Toffler elegantly calls it the age of 'designer currencies'. A phone company's prepaid card is an example of a designer currency. You buy a card for a predetermined value and use it to make phone calls. The value diminishes in real time as you use it. Now, this is great for the card provider, because in one fell swoop, the provider has raked in money in advance for services yet to be delivered. The 'Mashreq Millionaire scheme is a clever variation of this concept.

This concept can easily be expanded. Consider children for a moment. Parents want to teach their young ones to be responsible yet be fiscally prudent. How about a financial institution offering a smart card aimed at children? It could be valid for no more than two soft drinks a day; it would allow the child to rent videos from a video parlor yet disallow adult-rated films. The same could be used at movie theaters, and book stores. The parent could receive a statement at month-end giving all transaction details. It would also enable the child to review his own spending habits, and learn fiscal prudence in the process.

Another opportunity lies hidden in the folds of this transformation. How about encouraging people to pay bills bit by bit, instead of at fixed intervals - like rents and charge accounts? This way an electronic bleeding, bit by bit, could be engineered from a bank account in tiny drops, on a continuous basis. Such a system would enable customers to make lower interest payments, and provide an entirely new cash flow mechanism for the service provider.

Money is rapidly getting redefined. Instead of expensive watermarked paper that suffers from the drawback of being counterfeited [and the unsought consequence of deforestation], it is being transformed into strings of zeros and ones that are electronically transported from one place to another, never mind the distance and time of day.

Now these zeros and ones are not just zeros and ones. They represent a lethal combination of knowledge embedded in technology. Listen to Dee Hock, the founder of VISA International, "Banking will not retain its position as the primary operator of payment systems." Banks have enjoyed a monopoly through government protection in check-clearing services. This monopoly is under immediate and severe threat.

The super-symbolic economy has other, unintended, and unexpected repercussions. It threatens to shake and shatter the very foundation of long-lasting and deep rooted power equations. This stems from the curious and recent marriage of knowledge and technology. Organizations that fail to recognize this will simply be flattened by fleet-footed competitors.

Knowledge work has become a reality. Many large [and successful] corporations have missed the significance of this fact. The arrogance that inevitably takes shelter under the soothing shadow of success has disabled large entities - airlines, auto makers, steel smelters, shipyards, textile mills, drug makers - from recognizing that their dominance will be woefully short-lived. But worse has happened. This managerial bankruptcy is hurting those least responsible and least able to retaliate - their work force. How often have you heard managers and industry leaders blame themselves for the sorry state of affairs? No, it's always the market, the fickle customers, and the workers who have let them down. This is the worst form of bigotry. You take the credit when things go well, and don't lose a second blaming your troops when things begin to go awry.

No, this won't take companies far in the super-symbolic economy. Survival will demand that governments and organizations view their work force in a completely new light. Governments cannot hope to overcome joblessness by increasing the number of jobs. The problem is not with numbers any more. Joblessness has shifted from quantitative to qualitative.

The strength of a nation state or an organization stems from the collective knowledge that resides in the heads of its constituents. If that knowledge can be used freely and unfettered, the productivity will rise by leaps and bounds. There is a crying case for allowing people to work part-time and study part-time. If my son can work for a few hours after school, it will teach him to value time and money. It will also develop in him a healthy respect for the dignity of labor, something that is woefully lacking here. What is wrong with part-time work, anyway? The entire developed world benefits from it. What makes this place so darn different? Remember, what was necessary and appropriate ten years ago is likely to be a millstone around your neck today, thanks to the new economy.

The need of the hour is to stop treating employees as a lump of liabilities, and start thinking of them as valuable assets, individuals who can do a lot, only if they are allowed to. The flow of information cannot be controlled any longer. There is no meaning in selective transmission of information any more. The need of the decade is self-regulation, where a nation's citizens, a company's employees, or a family's members practice self-governance. Any attempts by big brother to smother information will only encourage the citizenry to be more creative in devising methods to circumvent meaningless control mechanisms.