For $95 a Year, Stratos Promises Ease of Use as a Consolidated Card Service

Consumers wielding multiple credit and debit cards in their wallets have yet another service to use to consolidate them into one electronic payment card.

Stratos Inc. on Tuesday introduced its Stratos Bluetooth Connected Card that enables consumers to load multiple cards onto the electronic device. The card begins shipping in April.

To use it, consumers swipe their credit, debit, loyalty, or prepaid cards through a card reader attached to a smart phone. Users verify the information via an iOS or Android app.

The smart phone and the Stratos card connect via Bluetooth to sync the card data to the Stratos card. Users can select three favorites, which are linked to three buttons on the face of the Stratos card. To pay, the consumer taps one of the buttons on the card. A pop-up notification appears on the user’s smart phone indicating the selection.

The card then loads the pertinent payment data onto the rewriteable magnetic stripe so the consumer can swipe the Stratos card through a point-of-sale terminal.

The service, which costs $95 annually, is an effort to digitize card data and make it easier to use, Henry Balanon, Stratos chief technology and co-founder, tells Digital Transactions News. Likening it to the transformation of music from compact discs to digital files stored on media players, Balanon says payments is going through a similar change. “The industry evolved so things are being digitized,” he says.

Others, such as Final and Coin, also hope to capitalize on consumer willingness to lighten the load in their physical wallets.

Card-consolidation technology comes along as the U.S. payment card industry is beginning to move away from magnetic-stripe transactions to ones that rely on EMV chip cards, which must be dipped into POS terminals.

Balanon is not overly concerned about this change, yet. “It’s still early days for payments on connected devices,” he says, while acknowledging there may be instances where issuers want the consumer to use the chip instead of the magnetic stripe. “As of right now, the mag stripe continues to be the predominantly-deployed interface,” he says.

A benefit of Stratos is that the annual membership includes updates to the card, he says. In the meantime, the Ann Arbor, Mich.-based company says it offers tokenization with magnetic-stripe transactions.

As for near-field communication (NFC) contactless payments, Balanon says Stratos will add an NFC chip to a future version of the card, but would not say when. A biometric authentication feature also is in development, but he would not disclose details about its progress or partners Stratos may be working with.

The annual membership entitles Stratos users to a personalized card, and because of that, it must verify the identity of users and comply with federal know-your-customer standards, Balanon says. The service also includes the ability to turn off the card if it’s not near the user’s smart phone for a specific amount of time. Balanon says Stratos is working with some banks to spread the word about the service, and the company is using online ads to reach consumers.