Tired of a fat wallet? Coin lets you hold all your cards in a single connected card
Dec. 4 - 5, 2013 — With all the hype surrounding mobile payments these days, that industry faces a monumental problem: Credit cards are already pretty easy to use. — Now Coin, a Y Combinator …
Context & Ripple Effects
Predictions that payment cards would become electronic — including a 2010 forecast of cards disappearing into phones — had already framed the wallet as a technology problem. A 2011 debate over the credit card’s end sharpened the question of whether consumers needed a replacement at all.
Coin takes a different route from outright card replacement: it consolidates existing payment cards into a connected physical card. That matters because the article identifies the incumbent card’s ease of use as mobile payments’ central adoption hurdle.
First-order effects
- Coin gives people carrying multiple payment cards a single connected card through which to consolidate them, while leaving the familiar card form factor at the point of use.
Second-order effects
- Mobile-payment products must compete not only with conventional cards but with a physical-wallet simplification product that reduces card clutter without asking users to change payment behavior.
Third-order effects
- If consolidation products gain traction, payment-wallet competition may divide between replacing the card with a phone and making the existing card ecosystem more programmable without removing the card itself.
The trend: Consumer payments are moving toward a wallet layer that organizes payment credentials while minimizing changes to the familiar act of paying.