A Time of Magic

In the fight against online fraud, the latest weapon being added to the banking arsenal is the card reader.

This is a little gadget that you’ll soon get from your bank which you use by inserting your card, entering your PIN and then quoting the code number that is generated when you’re making an online purchase. Sensibly enough the first banks to introduce it are providing it free to their customers but I’m sure that’ll change.

How useful it will be remains to be seen. If you make a lot of online transactions then clearly you’ll end up using it a lot and presumably will at least remember where you put the thing when you need it for your latest purchase. Whether those of us who make online purchases relatively rarely will remember where it is and whether the batteries will still be OK when we find it is quite another matter.

That’s far from the greatest problem though. The technology requires that you have a chip on your card (and a very new one at that) which therefore means that it can’t currently be used for sites based in America which, of course, is the largest source of online retailers in the world in that chip cards aren’t currently being issued there.

A technology looking for a problem? I suspect it will turn out to be just that.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 11:18 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.