During the Cartes and IDentification trade show in Paris in November, France-based Oberthur Technologies displayed a chip card that contains two light-emitting diodes that poke through the surface. When consumers tap or wave the “Smart Lumiere” card at contactless-payment terminals, the LEDs light up, but they do not guarantee a transaction is approved.
One of the Oberthur cards has a cartoonish representation of Japanese movie monster Godzilla, fire blasting from his mouth and his eyes nearly burning red when activated by a reader. Another card offers a bucolic street scene, complete with streetlights with the two LEDs. A third card has the LEDs as headlights for a sports car.
The vendor hopes this year to launch cards with more than two LEDs, an Oberthur spokesperson tells PaymentsSource, declining to disclose the cards’ cost but acknowledging the price is higher than that of traditional plastic cards. The cards come in two varieties: pure contactless, which could appeal to North American issuers, and dual interface–with contact and contactless chips–which might appeal to European issuers of chip-and-PIN cards.
Cartes also featured what France-based vendor Gemalto NV calls the world’s first biodegradable smart card. The card’s body is made from renewable material easily recycled and usable as compost. When incinerated, the card does not emit toxic fumes, according to the company.
Gemalto also is offering packaging made from recycled paper and vegetable inks that reduce the product’s environmental impact.
Cartes also provided the opportunity to demonstrate further evidence of Near Field Communication’s promise and the gaps between that promise and the actual rollout of the contactless technology. Zenius Solutions Inc., a U.S.-based startup, demonstrated an application that would add contactless credit and debit card payment capabilities to smartphones and link the transaction functions to the devices’ operating systems.
A number of financial companies have tested phones with built-in NFC chips that deliver contactless-payment capabilities, but very few such devices are available for sale. As a bridge, some companies sell stickers with contactless-payment features to attach to phones, but the stickers do not actually communicate with the mobile devices.
Zenius’ chief technology officer, Ming-Li Liu, calls its product an “NFC add-on.” The product has two components. One part fits into a phone’s existing SIM card slot and is linked by a flexible cable to another section that includes an NFC chip and antenna that can be attached to the outside of the phone.
The setup enables users to make contactless payments at the point of sale and manage their various card accounts through a mobile-wallet application consumers can install on such smartphones as Apple Inc.’s iPhone or Research in Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry.
“If you have a BlackBerry or iPhone, you are not going to switch to another phone,” Liu says.
