Credit Cards Soon to Get a Makeover
 

Found a very interesting article today...

Some of you may have seen this but I thought it could have some potential here...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/22/yo....html?emc=eta1

Cards will soon have lights and buttons that allow users to choose to pay for items with reward points or credit.

:)MM

bigger question is what kind of redemption rates will you get?

Can I get one with 4G?

what do you mean by 4g?

Unfortunately, they don't seem to work in Europe. At least the article I read said that they wouldn't have the chip like the rest of the world.

yeah --lol--I guess I.... didn't see that... or I was trying to be cool and 'in' by posting a new thread :D

anyway, the tech is cool. Maybe we can hack into the software of the button and find a way to get like double miles :D

If you are going to hack it why stop at double miles? ;)

The notion of redeeming points rather than money for a specific purchase is nonsense unless the bank is going to make the points very valuable at specific merchants. However, the idea of storing multiple card accounts on a single physical card is appealing. For example, I might like to earn multiple ThankYou points per dollar at the supermarket, pharmacy or gasoline retailers, but earn one AAdvantage mile at other stores.

It is pretty funny to see them going all high tech over all this stuff, when there has always been a very low tech solution.

the high tech solution has buttons and electronics to reprogram the magnetic stripe to one value or another based on which button you push.

There's no reason not to have two stripes on the back of the card, there's way more than enough room available for it.

Swipe one stripe for miles, swipe the other one for rewards.

Or put one stripe on the front, one on the back. Either way it's a low tech approach to the issue.

The same company also makes a second card that is actually pretty cool. It has five buttons, and to use the card you need to input a pin number which will then show the card number and activate the stripe. No pin number, part of the credit card number is blocked out and there's no data in the stripe, your card can't be used if it's stolen.

Video demo here

http://news.cnet.com/8301-19882_3-20016433-250.html

My read sez these things are years away at the earliest.Basically these sound like a gimmicky solution to a non-problem.

MisterNice

I would rather them to spend the energy / resources to resolve the PIN based card issue first so we Americans would not get stranded at a French highway because we could not buy gas at unmanned gas stations which only PIN based cards are accepted. If Canadian banks can finally do it, why cant the US banks do it?

There was just a story in the New York Times the week before last about why this probably won't be happening for a while, if ever

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/business/17digi.html

The author seems to confuse the PIN based Smart Card versus the AMEX no-swipe payment - completely 2 different things. The AMEX stuff is for the payment convenience. The PIN based Smart Card is for the security. They dont even employ the same technology.

It is the cost issue to upgrade to the Smart Card. There is a lengthy thread in the Other Credit Card forum on this topic for over a year now.