Is cash the answer?

With all the uncertainty surrounding credit and debit cards, it's hard not to wonder if people would be better off just using cash. Bradley Wilkes had a similar thought when he founded Utah County-based WingCash in 2009.

"When you take a $5 bill out of your wallet and hand it to me and I put it in my wallet, that constitutes an immediate and final payment," Wilkes says. "It's safe and secure because you're not giving me access to an account number that allows me to abuse your wallet, the same way I could if I had your debit or credit card number. And I have no residual information that I could use to access your wallet fraudulently in the future."

Wilkes contends the same can be said of WingCash, a digitized version of actual cash. WingCash moves cash to the cloud by creating digital wallets for businesses, consumers and financial institutions. WingCash can be used by anyone who has such a wallet, whether it's to pay another WingCash user, to buy products in stores that accept WingCash, or as a gift card issued by a store. The biggest consumer safety advantage of WingCash is that it's based on "push" technology, Wilkes says. Opposed to a credit card with a physical number that can be taken from you, WingCash is only spent when the wallet owner proactively pushes the funds to another user.

There are advantages for store owners as well. "Business owners are always worried about [credit card]...