I missed Kai Ryssdal’s “Marketplace” (on American Public Media), where this piece was aired on December 2, 2010. It’s a lively, informative piece, well worth rescheduling for people like me who missed it the first time around.

For me its biggest eye-opener is the concept of mobile payment systems. Many Americans are aware that paper checks have gone the way of analog TV and Jimmy Stewart in the perennial nostalgia flick, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Perhaps not as big a segment of the public realizes that credit cards may become obsolete because of their commission fees that charge vendors to line the pockets of banks.

Few old timers like me are aware of novel ways of paying online. Sure, I know about electronic bill payment. But I’m in the dark when it comes to the various and sundry ways of using my mobile phone to pay Peter or Paul and keep my credit rating from going bust. Like many of my fellow citizens, I have a cell phone. But I use it more as a two-way radio—a kind of intercom—rather than as a bill payer.

Not that producer Sally Herships has any of her interviewees explain the details of mobile payment systems; that would add at least another three minutes to her drop-in. Still, during this Jimmy Stewart Christmas season of “getting and spending,” to quote Wordsworth, it’s good to learn about MPS—an acronym we Americans may well be using frequently in years to come.

In technologically savvy Asia, MPS is as well known as GPS.