Patent ID: 7380710

Claim:
A payment card, comprising: user account data recorded on a magnetic stripe on a payment card for reading by a conventional merchant point-of-sale magnetic-stripe card reader, and recorded according to industry-standards that specify the physical characteristics of cards, embossing, low-coercivity magnetic stripe media characteristics, location of embossed characters, location of data tracks, high-coercivity magnetic stripe media characteristics, and financial transaction cards; a data generator disposed within said card and that receives its initial programming and personalization data from a data receptor; a non-volatile memory associated with the data generator and for storing data received from the data receptor during personalization; a card-swipe detector for sensing the passing of a magnetic read head during scanning by said magnetic-stripe card reader; and a set of magnetic-transducer write heads located immediately under certain bit positions of said magnetic stripe, wherein written data values of such bits can be controlled by the data generator and such bit positions are thereby programmable; wherein, the card-swipe detector triggers the set of magnetictransducer write heads to autonomously write a new user account data to said magnetic stripe that is dependent on data that was previously stored in the non-volatile memory during said personalization.