This looks like a good competitor for all the other cards (Coin if it ever comes out, Plastc, and Wallaby) at a very reasonable price if you get in early.

http://www.swypcard.com/



(I looked and couldn't find this at all on Flyertalk. Please move it if a thread already exists)

I see they have an EMV chip in their rendering, so there is that. Though I'm not convinced how well it will work, so I have my doubts about the long term prospects of any of these multi-card-replacement-things.

From their FAQ:

SWYP can replace any magnetic stripe based card. This includes credit cards, debit cards, loyalty cards, gift cards and frequent flyer cards, to name a few.

SWYP can store 25 cards encrypted in its memory. So there is plenty of room for all your cards. If you own a huge number of cards, no worries: the SWYP companion app on your phone can take care of the rest!

Your SWYP card ships with a card reader similar to the ones used at farmer�s markets and pop-up shops. Connect the reader to the audio jack in your phone, fire up the app, and start adding cards by swiping them through the reader. Your phone will securely and wirelessly transfer the cards to your SWYP card.

The thing that comes to my mind first: if this accepts gift cards, I wonder if I could load lots of VGCs into it. I'd then want to easily unload the VGCs after I use them (for example, when loading my BlueBird at Wally World). The video doesn't say how easy it is to delete cards stored on this thing.

Also, since it doesn't say "debit card" on it, and it doesn't have your name on it, I wonder if this would even fly for MSing. Cashiers sometimes look for my name on the card I'm using. At Wally, an occasional cashier even wants to see that the card I'm using says "debit" on it.

I'll probably stay old-fashioned for now.

All of these products coming out are about a year or two too late, IMO.

Though, what if they came out in 2011-2012 instead of now? Would the US EMV migration be a lot different (e.g. actually delaying the liability shift), especially if some sort of rudimentary tokenization could be implemented? I almost feel like if these were around for the Target breach they would have gotten a massive boost simply because the mobile app could just push a new card number just for Coin/Swyp/etc. without replacing the actual card.

By gift cards, I think they mean store-specific gift cards.

Loyalty card, store-specific gift cards, and frequent flyer cards (aren't those just a subset of loyalty cards, though?) are all that's likely to work with this in a couple years. Visa/MC gift debit cards, since they're debit cards, will go EMV, and when you try to swipe an EMV card at an EMV terminal that's fully EMV enabled, it rejects it and demands that you insert it. So unless their insert mechanism works flawlessly, EMV cards are not likely to work even though they will still have swipe strips on them.

The problem with most of these "card consolidator" systems is that they're being designed by people who don't have much experience with EMV because they don't travel overseas much. They may not know important things like that an EMV card with a swipe strip cannot be swiped successfully at a fully-enabled EMV terminal. If they didn't shop at Wal-mart during the window of time that Wal-mart terminals were fully-enabled EMV terminals (many have had EMV partly disabled the last few months), then they've probably never even seen EMV in true action, even if they now have an EMV card or two.

Meanwhile, how much can you charge for a gizmo that only consolidates loyalty (airline/hotel/Kroger/etc) cards and store-specific gift cards (the main types of cards that are likely to stay swipe-only) and expect people to buy it with those limitations???

And, btw, to me, this particular product seems especailly archaic since it seems to be an alternate spelling of the dying techonology of swipe...

There's no guarantee that Visa/MC gift cards will go EMV. In the UK I think they're still magstripe only, for example.

So... Uhh... What's to prevent someone from using one of these gizmos to steal your card info while they're in the back of the restaurant processing your credit card payment?

Why bother with all that fancy equipment to copy the data and clone it onto a fake credit card when you can just swipe it into your phone and load it onto your Swyp/Coin/Plastc/whatever?

Can't speak for the others but Coin uses small authorizations to validate that the card is yours.

From Swyp

The SWYP hardware platform will be EMV ready. The functionality will be enabled via an over the air firmware upgrade when the US market makes a definitive transition to EMV.

1. "Definitive"? So the increasing number of smaller businesses that accept it doesn't count?
2. Still not sure how they're going to pull it off without bank relationships or some sort of proxy card a la Google Wallet.

And how many banks do they have on board with this?

Seems like an easy way to steal your credit card info.

I don't think the issue is so much business that accept it, but more the businesses that require it. Just like those few weeks where you had to use the chip at wal-mart, but now that function has been turned off. The mag strips still work on all of those cards...

If they have Europay, Mastercard, and Visa on board, isn't that what would allow them to use the technology?

If you watch the video on their site, the card automatically locks when it's a certain distance from your phone, and then can only be unlocked with a user set code. Based on that it's just as secure as softcard, so a little safer than an actual wallet filled with credit cards?

Without requiring it, acceptance is almost pointless.

Given Europay hasn't existed for years, it'd be difficult to get them on board Mastercard and Visa can provide tokenisation services, but they do that through banks. Ultimately, issuing banks are the ones who have to provide a product like this a tokenised account number and the private keys needed to generate transaction cryptograms. Apple had no problem because they're Apple.

It seemed like a fun toy for $50, and for that plus some other ancillary benefits, it seems worth the risk. If they say it'll work, I'm going to lean toward just trusting that for until I hear otherwise. Also, if anyone is interested in getting it, I have a referral code.