Gone were the days when credit cards were hip and for the higher class. The credit card world has taken a tremendous leap now. Companies now plan on launching credit card with the ability to talk to their owners. These new cards will also have the ability to show balance apparently.
They are expected to be launched in the United States this year end. Extremely thin microprocessors will be installed in them and these cards will run on batteries. Three years will be the life span of these batteries.
There are even talks about ditching credit cards completely and installing chips in cell phones which will serve as credit cards. This is a very farfetched idea though and might take years.
Todd Ablowitz, president of Denver-based Double Diamond Group which is a consulting firm whose main focus is on payments strategy technologies and products told creditcards.com: ‘Although mobile payments is the future, you’re not going to move all that overnight to magical phones.
‘So these are step innovations, rather than leap innovations. Some are very much needed, and some are probably not going to make it.’
CEO Jeff Mullen said: ‘Magnetic stripe readers are being placed in more places than ever before — like vending machines, movie theater kiosks and taxicabs.
‘Even in Japan, where the infrastructure is in place and phones [which can make payments] have been distributed for seven years, the volume of phone payments is still significantly less than one per cent share of transactions.
‘European chip cards comprise only about 10 percent of cards in world.’
Source: PalScience.com
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