Carrying a wallet sucks. No question. It’s big, bulky and full of bank, credit and debit cards and a swathe of stupid loyalty cards from that coffee place you’ll never go back to. The dream is to have everything in one simple card. Meet Coin: the smart bank card that keeps all your cards in one.
Coin is a regular-sized debit card that lets you store multiple cards at once. Everything from your business credit card through to your personal debit card can be logged on the Coin.
To get cards into the device, you simply plug a swipe-card reader into your iPhone or other iOS device (no word if it works with Android yet), give the card a description and the app transfers the data to the Coin via Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy.
The Coin then has all your cards programmed into it, and you simply press a little button on the digital card itself to switch between accounts. One assumes that when you select a card, it can reprogram the magnetic stripe at the top of the card to represent the data you scanned into your iPhone.
It also has a zone alarm, which means that if you put your card down or have it stolen and it gets too far away from you, your iPhone pushes you a notification saying it has gone out of range.
The only two issues I can really envisage with this right now is the fact that it relies on magnetic stripe technology, not chip-card or contactless payment tech which is often safer. The other issue is that you probably won’t be able to stick this into your ATM and pull cash out.
Other than that, it looks incredible, and I want one.
[Coin]