Banks will provide the cards if they earn a profit from doing so, which ultimately depends on whether consumers and merchants find smart cards worthwhile. Instead of focusing solely on one trial, it is valuable to take a wider perspective. The University of Exeter also tried smart cards and now is rolling out a new version of its Mondex smart card. Students also find such cards useful. One obvious result of the survey is that, while the sample of students has had a good overall impression of the cards in each of three surveys, faculty and staff did not even in the third survey after a year of use.
Every question reveals that faculty and staff use the cards less.
Students are more likely to find the cards useful over a large part of their transactions, whereas faculty and staff have relatively more transactions off campus where the cards are useless. The survey results at Exeter suggest that general lack of acceptability of smart cards in New York may have been their over-riding disadvantage. The exceptions were for repetitive transactions in the same location, as in a laundromat or large transactions in grocery stores. In grocery stores, though, debit and credit cards are likely to be at least as useful as electronic money stored on smart cards. One way to avoid problems of general acceptability would be to make smart cards usable with the old technology as well as the new one.