Story here. Launched in Singapore and will be available there from January before going global. Pretty neat.
Excerpt: **"The card has touch-sensitive buttons and the ability to create a ‘one-time password’ – doing away with the need for a separate device sometimes needed to log in to online banking.
“Future versions of the card could display added information such as the remaining balance.”**
Holy sci fi Batman!
And you thought butt-dialling your phone was a problem. Imagine when your wallet has butt-initiated a transfer of your entire credit limit to that ex whose info you never removed from your Online Banking account!
“Swiping your card through the slot” will take on a whole new meaning.
How will this fit into an ATM?
We have chips. We ram our cards into the slot and leave them there until we’re done.
Though the up-and-coming thing is contactless transactions, involving a gentle tap, if that.
Seems the screen and buttons are only for security token uses, like the Digipass 270.
I think they’ve put this on a standard-sized card. Or maybe it’s a little longer, but the “height” is the same?
Speaking of card sizes, one of the things I scavenged from my father’s possessions after he died was various sizes of old department-store charge cards from the 1950s and 1960s. People don’t realize that cards were not a standard size until a certain point in time. There’s an agency, I think in Switzerland, tasked with setting card sizes the world over.
It honestly seems like it won’t last long, once that near field thing is complete. Having it on a card is just odd. And surely it has to have at least cell service, or else how can it create tokens?
The Digipass tokens have an internal clock, and generate a code based on the current time (to the minute) and a formula (should be unique to the token), so no data transfer needed. I think this is how current car key fobs work.