Smart-cards step forward. Magnetic line cards market is now formed in all developed countries. Giant infrastructure was created processing centers, money access machine, trade terminals, hundreds million cards in use, international standards are formed and admitted. That is why magnetic line cards will be still in use for many years. However, world leaders VISA, Europay, MasterCard have already declared about inevitable conversion to smart-card technology in future.
All of them started developing future international standards for payment systems based on smart-cards. Even in Europe where magnetic line cards are traditionally popular smart-cards are winning one project after another. The most successful introduction of smart-cards is supposed to take place in the countries where magnetic cards hold a weak position in the countries without high quality well branched and reliable communication systems in the countries with a high criminal level where the population have a low credit reliability.
These days many Russian banks issue traditional magnetic cards of international payment systems. However, such issues are definitely oriented on concrete social consumer group and regions of their use are quite limited. Now lets say some words about a smart-card. The medium in smart-cards is a small processor chip. The identification area allows only one record while personalizing the card and later available for reading only. Access to other areas available only after the card holder entered the proper key. The smart-cards security level is much higher than the magnetic cards one. As to prices on smart-cards, they are higher, but they become lower and lower every year as their technology is being improved and production scale is being enlarged The smart-cards are small computers is some way. Modern smart-card chips features can be compared with personal computers in early 80 s. Part of the data located on a smart-card can be used only in internal card s operations.
This fact together with high level cryptographic security makes smart-cards valuable asset for financial systems demanding additional security and reliability. Because of that smart-cards are now considered to be the most promising kind of plastic cards.
They can be also considered to be the most promising for their features. Smart-cards counting abilities allow card holder to keep multi-currency wallet.
As predicted by VISA and EuropayMasterCard, smart-cards will replace magnetic line cards within the 10 year period.