The standard everyday credit card may soon be a thing of the past. For starters, ‘smart’ cards look and feel like the credit cards you may already have in your wallet but with the addition of a micro processor embedded within the card itself. This allows information to be stored on the card in much the same way as a magnetic strip (which will usually run along the back of the card). The difference here is that more than one set of information can be stored on a card at the same time thus also giving the user the ability to switch between them depending on which account is to be used to pay for something whether it be a credit card account, debit or savings account.
This along with the technology to bypass the PIN system when making a transaction and moving it onto the card itself by way of actually pressing buttons found on the card, will mean that the card need only be swiped.
With all this said and done, this is still a technology in the works. But a company called Dynamics may be the first to get this technology into the hands of the consumer.
The founder of Dynamics; CEO Jeffrey Mullen explained the various differences of what smart cards would be capable of. Firstly he showed one such card that effectively held two separate accounts. The user would be able to press a button on the card to switch it from one account to the other and back again. He then showed a security-enabled card that kept both the magnetic strip and the human-readable number on the front of the card obscured until a security code was entered in.
One major improvement to the usual credit cards you get today is that in-spite of these ‘smart’ cards holding all this technology, the card says just as durable, waterproof and will survive just as much as standard cards go through at the moment. Obviously these cards are going to be more expensive to produce on a mass scale but with the added security features and user value, this would hopefully balance things somewhat.
(Curtesy of news.cnet.com)
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