He's talking about smart cards, and for card proponents, his words are another dose of bad news in their decade-long struggle to crack the U.S. market. Despite the allure of a cashless society and growing acceptance of smart cards abroad, not many Americans are carrying them in their wallets.
Smart cards get their brains from a microchip, rather than the credit card's magnetic strip.
These chips can store reams of data and adapt to fill a variety of applications. Instead of contacting a central computer system to authorize each transaction, as is necessary with conventional credit or debit cards, merchants with smart-card readers handle the transaction themselves. Brainy as they are, the cards have yet to make the case that they're needed. And consumers appear quite content with the convenience afforded by credit and debit cards. They don't understand the value of another card in the wallet.