CES 2011: Credit Card Technology from Dynamics Inc.

From the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Citibank announced that later this year they will be running a pilot program using Card 2.0.

How Card 2.0 technology works

Ever since the dawn of credit cards, the information stored on their magnetic strips has been fixed – it cannot be changed, altered, or updated after a card is created. However Dynamics Inc. aims to change that. Their technology brings credit cards into the 21st century by basically building a card programmer into the card itself.

The possibilities for this technology are endless but Citi will be using it for one very specific purpose in their pilot program – the redemption of credit card rewards. They will be issuing cards which have two buttons on them… one button allows the customer to make a normal purchase, however the second button allows the customer to pay for the purchase using the account’s reward points.

This is accomplished by rewriting the magnetic strip’s 1,200 bits of data when a button is pressed. For example, the strip would be programmed with the normal credit card account info for a regular purchase. Then when the rewards button was pushed, the strip would be re-written with different account data for a rewards account. According to Dynamic Inc’s CEO and inventor, to make this possible there are over seventy electrical components crammed into 1/10th of a cubic square inch on the credit card. Surprisingly, the card is said to still look and feel the same as a traditional credit card.