Photos: Visa predicts the future of paying

Coffees with mobiles and PIN pads on card

By Julian Goldsmith, 10 November 2008 11:00

This is Visa's core product - the humble plastic chip card. However, as technology has shrunk in size the card has got a lot smarter.

Photo credit: Julian Goldsmith

Comments

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  1. 1. anonymous

    Retailers will not cought up more money for contactless or other new whacky PIN Entry Devices (PED's) or re-accreditation costs as they got absolutely no benefit from current Chip and PIN, and a bucket load of costs.

    Maybe VISA should conentrate on other simple ways forward.

    - Chip and PIN in USA - In some places you don't even have to sign !!!
    - A cheap, simple USB Chip and PIN 'PED' to connect to a home PC for secure Internet shopping. I mean how hard can this be ?

  2. 2. Guy Reynolds

    So how good is the printing on these keypad cards going to be and how long is the card issue period going to be?

    If you are continously going to be entering the same 4 digit pin into the card, the buttons are going to wear and/or get dirty. The criminal who now gets hold of your card knows from the wear on the keypad which 4 digits are in the pin reducing the possible varients from 10000 to between 1 and 24 depending on whether numbers are used multiple times.

    Ok you don't need a separate reader to generate the one time pin, but at least having the separate reader (unless you carry it with the card and so the worn key problem still applies) any criminal get hold of your card still has 10000 pin combinations to work through.

  3. 3. lardy

    "the future of paying" being predicted (or even led) by the people that brought us 'verified by visa' (the amazing service that encourages you to type in your password (& even set a new password:) in the merchant's website). is almost as frightening as the future of technology being influenced by microsoft.

    ok, it's not anywhere near that frightening but it's still quite frightening.

    paypal are the only mainstream guys to have got online payment right - in 2008 why am i ever asked to identify myself on anybody but my credit card's or bank's site?

    also, a card that accepts input & displays transaction details for you to confirm is a long long time overdue.....

  4. 4. Richard A

    Bless them, they really haven't thought this through, have they!

    A key pad on the back of a credit card? How long before that breaks or - far worse - wears, revealing which keys get used on a daily basis?

    Kerching!

    More liability and costs moved to consumers and merchants? I think so.

    Kerching! Kerching!

    And these babies won't be cheap to replace if you accidentally leave one in your back pocket when you sit down in tight jeans / do the laundry...

    Krrrack!

    Kerching! Kerching! Kerching!

  5. 5. Ollie Clark

    I think I'll still stick to cash thanks. When I go to buy a newspaper, I'll get the right cash out of my wallet and then drop it into the retailers hand and walk off. Total transaction time less than a second. Even with a contactless payment card, the retailer has to type the amount in and then you have to wave your card around until it's read. Total transaction time probably 5 or more seconds. Even with change, cash is as fast.

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