Smartcard hype or expensive flop?
Last week I published a post on yet another smart card that promised to take all the credit, debit, gift, membership, rewards and ID cards that are cluttering wallets and promised to combine them into a single, all-purpose card. The makers of the Fuze Card are hoping to capitalize on the anti-wallet trend with their new smart card, designed to hold up to 30 cards in one. It is engineered to seamlessly work with a variety of systems such as ATMs, portable readers, contactless payments, and ID access cards. And hopefully, it has better luck cashing in than Coin, who this year closed the curtains on their once promising digital wallet startup.
The post was put up to provide evidence that there are still companies out there who continue to promise a single card that can do everything. The comments that came in (mainly from LinkedIn) were predictable. Pulled together under the generic heading ‘who cares - hasn’t this been done before?’, and summed up by one commentator ‘We already have this - its called a smart phone’, I thought it would crash and burn the way other card start ups have done.
Not the case, though. So far, the makers of Fuze Card have raised over $530,000 via crowdfunding. The standard Fuze Card has an estimated shipping date of July 2017, while the Fuze Card with an EMV chip has an estimated shipping date of January 2018. To use the Fuze smart card, users only need to charge Fuze, pair the device with the companion app, add their cards using the included card reader, and then create a unique six button pin code to secure their data. To know what card you’re about to access, you don’t have to jump onto your mobile phone, like other smart card solutions we have seen in the past. The Fuze Card has an E-Paper display designed to not only display card names, but also show barcodes where applicable. This is especially useful for membership cards that don’t have magnetic strips or embedded chips.
I thought these card offerings had faded away but this is clearly not the case for the US market. Coin crashed and burned as did a similar offering - Plastc. In the latter case though, there was an initial bailout and the white knight, EDGE Mobile Payments, LLC, a Santa Cruz-based Fintech company, is extending the Plastc bailout offer to the customers of the Coin card, due to strong demand from former Plastc customers. During the first month of the offer, more than 1,000 people who paid for the Plastc card have signed up to become eligible to receive a discount on the purchase of an EDGE Card.
So here we go again, the EDGE card once again promises a one card to rule them all scenario only this time the design also resembles… an iPhone! What’s the point? But perhaps more importantly, why do people keep buying into the idea of using a card when mobile apps and the plethora of (x)Pays out there can do the job just as easily? Truly, I would love to know. Is it to do with lack of mobile coverage in the US, the slow take-up of mobile payments or perhaps people just prefer using a card over a phone. Whatever the reason, the ideal ’single smart card’ offering doesn’t seem to be abating - just a cannibalisation of users willing to fund a Kickstarter campaign.
Talking of campaigns - hats off last week to TfL and Lucozade who were handing out free Lucozade bottles with a contactless chip at the base at Oxford Circus station, which could be used to pay for a single journey on London’s tube network. Passengers simply had to tap the bottle at the gates as they were using a normal card. The promotion is part of a wider marketing campaign for the energy drink on the tube, which involves billboard advertising and other elements.
“We are excited for Lucozade Energy to be able to launch this new campaign on the Tube,” said Ashleigh Roberts, senior brand manager at Lucozade Energy. “In a city that’s always on the go, we’re giving Londoners an extra opportunity to get where they need to be in a fun and unique way.”
I have no idea how well the campaign went in practise but considering the way Contactless Intelligence’s traffic spiked over 3000% on just this one story, I am guessing it was a success. Well done to to both companies! More like this please…
Steve Atkins
Contactless Intelligence
