The card will be available for those aged 13 and over and some safeguards in place around parental control. It’s not possible to borrow on the card, so, in its Q&A for concerned parents, the article instead focuses its worries around the (seedy) world that having a Visa card might open up for an errant teen: ‘So what’s going to stop them buying porn or booze over the net?’ Well, the challenges of explaining to your parents what the crate of alchopops is doing on the doorstep for one. Sexually explicit material? Yes, that is perhaps a concern. But,  as O2 I’m sure know, phones are already being used by young people as a vehicle for this already.

More interesting to me is the footnote to the story is the parallel launch of the very similar ‘Cash Manager’ card for adults, making it the first mass-market, fee free, pre-pay Visa card. As the article highlights, this means that ‘Britain’s unbanked – especially recent immigrants, but all those refused banking facilities – can obtain a Visa card for free’ (you do also have to have an O2 phone).

It’ll be interesting to keep an eye on both takeup and the precise ways in which these two cards actually come to be used, as they are integrated into people’s everyday lives.