Will that be credit or debit? Or rather, what’s the difference?

Beyond the obvious — debit cards pull money from your checking account while credit cards draw on a credit facility the issuer has provided — there’s not much difference to a consumer, provided she has money in her checking account.

This is even more true when the card is used as part of an Apple Pay or Android Pay transaction. For young people in particular, whether debit, credit, or prepaid, it’s all just money. Reports of the blending of payment instruments have been circulating in financial services for some time, but when the CEO of one of the nation’s largest banks says it, perhaps it is finally time to sit up and take notice.

Here’s Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf speaking at the Goldman Sachs Financial Services Conference last Tuesday:

We are today the No. 1 debit issuer in the country, but on the credit card side, we’re sixth or seventh. Now, we’re almost at 43% of our customers carrying our credit card, which is a good thing, but we should be and need to be a lot larger in that business, especially as it relates to our customers.

And I care more about that, I like that business across the board, but I like that almost more in the payment side than on the actual returns in the business, which are very good, because I think in this new world that we’re now in — more convenient, more available, more real-time — payment activity will be important and we’ll probably be the last generation to use the term “credit card” and “debit card.” It will probably be “debit access” and “credit access” and it will be likely loaded on to a mobile device and once it gets there, it becomes I think much more permanent than what a piece of plastic is.

Stumpf’s comments hold true in the startup world, too. Witness Debitize, a New York-based startup launched June 2014. Debitize is aimed at millennials, and bringing back debit rewards — a rarity since the Durbin Amendment — and other credit card benefits to debit cards. It does this by offering a credit card that behaves like a debit card — users must have funds in their checking account to cover purchases. Millennials can, therefore, build credit and get rewards while still using “debit cards.”

Jud Linville, chief executive officer at Citi Cards, struck a similar note at Money20/20 last fall when asked what would happen to card brands in a mobile payments environment. “To us it’s not all about the transaction; it’s what you build and curate around that transaction,” he said. “So, not just simply at the payment, but before the payment, whether it’s geolocation offers, after the payment, digital lockboxes to store things, even a price rewind to make sure you got the best deal.”

Whether its’ debit, credit, or prepaid makes little difference in this context, except perhaps in the case of price rewind. But that’s another matter entirely.