She handed it right back. "We only take Visa and MasterCard," she said, puzzled by my Stratos card, which holds multiple credit and debit cards in the magnetic stripe running across its back. The trouble is, the card doesn't display any official logos, giving it the look of an attractive scam. She swiped the Stratos after I convinced her it actually held a Visa. The word "approved" flashed in blue across her terminal screen. Paying with a Stratos may not be as seamless as holding your iPhone near the register and using Apple Pay. Apple's mobile payments service lets iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus owners use their smartphones and their fingerprints to charge purchases to their credit cards just by holding their iPhone near a terminal. And while technologists rejoice at Apple Pay's security, only 6 percent of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus owners used Apple Pay as of March, according to market researcher InfoScout.

Now so-called smart cards like Stratos, Coin, Plastc and Swyp have come on the scene, When coupled with a smartphone app, these devices -- which cost around $100 -- let users store and toggle among different payment cards on the fly, trooper series case for apple iphone xr - black Cards are scanned in using a small card reader and managed with a smartphone app, Their pitch: A single all-purpose solution that melds modern networking and payments technologies for mainstream consumers, That is, until the financial infrastructure catches up with Apple Pay, Google Wallet and other digital payments systems..

Just ask Square, the payments company headed up by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. The company continually rebrands various software efforts, like Square Wallet and Square Order, as it tries to get consumers to pay with their smartphones. Square declined to comment for this story. "Using this card [Stratos] is a way to immediately link your smartphone to the current infrastructure," Olsen said. Greg Rosen, an investor at New York-based venture fund Box Group, shares that point of view. Although he was an early preorder customer of Coin, which originally launched in November 2013, Rosen just got his hands on the finished product. He's used the card for three weeks now without any hiccups.

"Apple Pay has paved the way for the connected card," said Jason Townsend, a partner at Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Resonant Venture Partners, a Stratos investor, "The whole point of a mobile payments solution is that I can use it trooper series case for apple iphone xr - black everywhere, If I can't use it everywhere, then I still need my wallet and what's the point?"Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru is skeptical, "The only problem [smart cards are] addressing is a fat wallet full of cards," Mulpuru, an expert in e-commerce, said, "Is that really that big of a problem?"Still, Mulpuru doesn't expect people to exclusively use their smartphones and mobile payments systems for at least a decade, But she does think the mobile payments space is poised on the edge of more substantial change..

That's because EMV, or the EuroPay Mastercard Visa standard, is expected to spread throughout the US credit card industry by the end of the year. EMV promises greater security through small microchips embedded in plastic. While Europe has had the technology for years, the US pushed for the technology only after high-profile hacks on Target and other retailers. By October 2015, merchants that haven't upgraded their terminals to accept the new cards will be the ones liable for fraud, not the credit card companies. The result: we'll start to see many more EMV-ready point-of-sale (POS) systems.