Compared to Android Pay and Apple Pay, smart credit cards may soon become the preferred option. Although incredible technological advances have been seen recently regarding to how products and services are paid for, not everyone is interested in completing purchases with a phone.
With Apple Pay, iPhone users have the ability to use fingerprint authentication as a means of paying for purchases at a number of participating stores. However, what was hailed as an amazing application, it seems that Apple Pay is not doing as well as predicted. Nine months after being launched, just 6% of iOS users take advantage of the application.
Android Pay offered by Google is not doing much better. Google created this application in direct response to the unveiling of Apple Pay and became a successor to Google Wallet. While Android Pay is growing in popularity, it still has not peaked.
This past March, Samsung announced that it too will offer a smartphone payment system known as Samsung Pay. This product is scheduled to launch in September for use with the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, at the same time the Galaxy Note 5 will launch. This particular application will have one advantage in that fees are more affordable compared to the competition.
Even with these different smartphone payment options, some people prefer to use physical plastic cards. Prompting this has been the rise in hack attacks that hit the White House, the Internal Revenue Service, a number of large financial institutions, and retail companies like Target and Starbucks.
For some people, these breaches have raised concern about making purchases using a smartphone payment application. For some consumers, the risk is still too high for identity theft, hack attacks, and other financial problems associated with criminal activity.
For these individuals, a possible solution is with smart credit cards. These cards look very similar to a traditional card made of plastic. However, a smart card is designed with a built-in microprocessor chip with standard PCI-DSS data encryption compliance. Because of this, personal identification is fully protected.
As part of the design, a smart credit card will have a magnetic strip reader that allows the user to swipe the card through for information to be read. After the card is swiped, information is uploaded via the reader to a smart card using Bluetooth.
Normal credit cards are capable of reading just one set of financial information for a single store brand whereas smart credit cards are designed to store card information for numerous stores. That means that same smart card can be used for a broad range of purchases.
In other words, instead of carrying around three retail cards, a Visa, and MasterCard, just one smart card would maintain the card information for all five of the cards so ultimately, you carry just one card around.
