Think of Card 2.0 as a universal remote for all your other debit and credit cards. Developed by a company called Dynamics, Inc., it looks like any other credit card except for a few small buttons on the front of it.
Those buttons will correspond to existing debit and credit cards that you already have. Once you’re up at the register, just select the card you want to use and the stripe on the back of Card 2.0 loads up the credentials from your chosen card to be read by any existing credit card machine.
According to the press release:
"The Electronic Stripe can be read at any existing point-of-sale (POS) magnetic stripe reader. The device itself can change any bit of information on this programmable stripe at any given time. The technology does not require any change to the 60 million 1970s-era magnetic stripe readers or reeducation of its merchant base. The device is designed to be as thin, flexible, and durable as a traditional payment card and last over three years on a single battery charge."
Unfortunately, it looks like these cards will ultimately be issued by financial institutions to customers. That’s a bit more limited than consumers being able to purchase and program the cards ourselves to use multiple accounts from multiple banks. Perhaps that’s coming up next. For now, though, if you do all of your banking and have all of your credit cards through the same place, this system looks pretty cool.
It’s been shown off at the DEMO conference this week, though there’s no word on when we’d actually see something like this on the market. The fact that the company secured almost $6 million in financing last year along with the card already being compatible with existing payment platforms may indicate that it won’t be too much longer.
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