The Daily Mail ran a story today that I thought was very interesting and relevant to our online industry about new technology being built and released on credit cards.
Check out the pics below, the first is a new card that can display balances, double as a reward card and even talk to their owners, thanks to wafer-thin microprocessors and batteries that last up to three years. These new cards will be introduced in the USA later this year.
A few years back, Europe moved to chip-enabled cards allowing the user to input a pin number to pay for goods. and as a result fraud has dropped dramatically. In France, fraud is down by 80%!
Introducing new cards in the USA have been slower, but some advancements have been test marketed. Like the Citibank 2G card (pictured below), which has a programmable magnetic strip and buttons on the front for users to choose to use it as a credit card or to spend reward points. If the trial succeeds, this will be rolled out across the country.
And Mastercard has also just released a new card, this one with a small LCD screen which displays a one-time code which the customer can use to make an online purchase. So even if your card details are stolen, they would be useless to buy anything with without the one-off code.
With technology like that, it really could change online shopping by moving the burden of proof to the consumer if they use their card + code, then claim fraud and charge it back! Not to mention getting rid of carders and fraudulent signups all together. Now THAT would be nice!!!
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