I have a lot of cards. Between gift cards, loyalty cards, and credit cards, I have at least 20-30 that I'd like to carry on me. I end up leaving cards I don't use every day in my car (and am always paranoid about the valet as a result). I use a KeyRing app for loyalty cards, but it's a pain and requires me often typing numbers into things. I often find myself in a Starbucks, realizing I left the Starbucks gift card in my car. Etc.

This would let me get away with a much slimmer wallet and is therefore quite convenient. If it works.

I don't get how you can end up with so many cards, it's seems like a very american problem. I have 5 cards in my wallet: * Debit card and a Visa credit card: both with chip&pin and allowing me to do secure transaction on the internet * A public transport card: RFC, also allow me to rent bikes * An ID card, also with a chip&pin, allow me to sign documents and fill my taxes * An insurance card which is not even a magnetic or electronic card, it's just a piece of plastic with my client number printed on it

And I don't really see why I should need or want more cards

I'm an American, and I have no idea how someone ends up with that many cards. I carry two: my credit card and by debit (ATM) card. I could easily leave the latter behind, since I very rarely use, but it feels prudent to keep it with me in case I need cash in an emergency. Beyond that, I could understand having a single company credit card if it makes sense for your job (it doesn't for mine).

For gift cards, I suppose it would be nice to have those all aggregated, but I do very little brick and mortar shopping, and virtually no impromptu brick and mortar shopping where having a library of loyalty cards with me at all times would be useful.

The same applies to loyalty cards. I do have a Macy's card, but they can just look that up for you at the store, so I don't carry it. I've probably lost the physical card.

I'm am American. Lets talk about cards for a bit, then?

I have a debit card, a credit card, a student ID that doubles as a payment card and rfid to get me into work. I also have a second rfid card for another building on campus that isn't part of the network, because apparently doors aren't on the internet yet, and a car insurance card that's basically a small slip of paper. That's my everyday wallet carry.

I also carry some keys: 3 for work, one for my car, and one for the apartment. I also have some loyalty cards on the keyring, for grocery shopping, and for the public library.

I also have several cards I leave at home: a debit card that's only for medical expenses paid out of my HSA, a visa gift card from the grandparents, a debit card from the local credit union (which I signed up for because my online bank didn't accept checks at the time and I needed to deposit my first paycheck), a different credit card I don't use often because the cashback is crap outside a narrow set of rotating categories (but can't close because it's also my oldest credit account).

Well I have no fewer than 4 checking accounts. I have a debit card for all them. I don't use any of the debit cards except at the ATM once in a while so I could probably go without three of them on my person.

Then I have 4 credit cards.*

That's 8 cards right there. Then I do my shopping at 3 different grocery stores, so they all get their cards. 3 because I take advantage of the sales at each and the selection. One doesn't have some of the stuff I want but the others do. This is pretty common, I know if I want a particular product I have to go to a particular store to get it. I go grocery shopping probably 3-4 times a week because I only buy enough stuff for 1-3 meals. This is to reduce waste. Less often shopping leads to food waste for me.

Sure they can look me up, and I used to not carry the grocery store cards, but I find flashing the card about 1000 times more convenient.

We are up to 12 cards.

I have to carry two IDs, driver's license and US GOVT ID. Card count 14.

Then I have a drugstore card that I use to get "points" for filling my prescriptions. These points are really worth it - you cash them in for merchandise and they are very generous with them. While they have ALL MY INFO (after all, they need it to fill the prescription) but about 70% of the time they want my card, I don't know why. It is just a billion times easier to have it on me.

Card count 15.

Library card - card count 16.

The rest are just random rarely used loyalty cards I don't need to carry but at this point why not carry them?

I don't get gift cards.

People ask why I have so many checking accounts, and it is to better manage my money (for example, I get just enough of my paycheck auto deposited to cover automatic withdraws and put that in a separate account so I know that's my "no touch" money) and take maximum advantages of all the rewards and benefits of each card or bank account.

I don't find any of this that daunting. When you already have to carry a few adding a few more isn't that big of a deal. I don't really have a problem with carrying these around and I prefer separate cards to some "smart card" that is some electronic thing to charge and break.

*I want to mention even with 4 CCs I don't have any CC debt.

Everyone should have at least 3. If you aren't fully taking advantage of credit card rewards you are subsidizing people like me who do.

"Everyone" is a far stretch. More like "people who like to (or don't mind) managing their finances at a finer level and also don't spend above their means."

Which is maybe 35% of the American population.

Some people are just fine not bothering with credit cards because convenience/simplicity/ease is more important to them. It's all about individual preferences and priority.

I'm am American. Lets talk about cards for a bit, then?

I have a debit card, a credit card, a student ID that doubles as a payment card and rfid to get me into work. I also have a second rfid card for another building on campus that isn't part of the network, because apparently doors aren't on the internet yet, and a car insurance card that's basically a small slip of paper. That's my everyday wallet carry.

I also carry some keys: 3 for work, one for my car, and one for the apartment. I also have some loyalty cards on the keyring, for grocery shopping, and for the public library.

I also have several cards I leave at home: a debit card that's only for medical expenses paid out of my HSA, a visa gift card from the grandparents, a debit card from the local credit union (I signed up for because my online bank didn't accept checks at the time and I needed to deposit my first paycheck), a different credit card I don't use often because the cashback is crap outside a narrow set of rotating categories (but can't close because it's also my oldest credit account).

I'm in your boat, BUT...

You could also easily have 5 store credit cards (J. Crew, Banana Republic, etc.) for extra discounts, a few gift cards you haven't spent yet (Starbucks, Best Buy, etc.), an extra 3 credit cards (they have different promotions), a handful of loyalty cards for discounts (a couple supermarkets, three or four coffee shops, a couple of restaurants), various forms of ID and access cards (company, school, gym, apartment complex front door)...

You can see how it adds up. The reasons for almost all of them are discounts or extra value. Keeping track of all these cards and carrying them around could easily save you several hundred dollars a year if you're willing to do it.

I've never seen one of those gift cards in plastic forms. This seems indeed to be very american ;) Every gift card I ever got or bought was just a piece of paper. And my only store loyalty cards are actually from the US (although they exist here as well).

Here they are much more commonly plastic. They look like a credit card and are on display at stores. It is just a much nicer presentation for a gift than a piece of paper you printed. It's also more convenient to hang onto. It doesn't have to be folded and get beaten up in your wallet when you don't use it for 2 months.

The only time you have something printed on paper is if you got it off a credit card rewards site for the most part.

In America, almost every store has its own loyalty card. Some places (God bless 'em) just let you use your phone number but most require you to have the card. There's 10 right there, easy. Everyone shops at a couple different grocery stores, a drug store, home good store, etc. Clothing, restaurants, gym. It adds up.

Then there's your driver's license. Health insurance. Car insurance.

On top of that credit cards. You're a fool if you don't have a few different ones, because they have rotating reward categories that give you bonuses. I bet a get a few grand a year that most people don't. But even still, I only have 3. And 1 ATM card on the off chance I ever need cash.

Plus gift cards. On the one hand, you don't want to carry those on you all the time. On the other, you'd often use them impulsively so you can't just leave them at home.

It adds up quite easily. It isn't that I want to carry all those cards. It's that I get substantial rewards for doing so.

Add in a driver's license, three more credit cards to take advantage of various bonus point offers which depend on what and where you buy things, a corporate credit card, corporate access key car, and three loyalty cards for the supermarkets where you shop most often. Now imagine you have a birthday party and your six of your friends give you gift cards to various stores and restaurants.

I've been minimizing my wallet, but still plenty of cardboard buy-5-get-1-free coffee cards somehow make their way into it. It really depends on the individual. In any case, I think that the idea of this one-card-to-rule-them all is wonderful. I realize it is wishful thinking, but I want to see them pull this off.

Drivers licence replaces ID and transport card.

The only extra I can think of is gym card. I carry 4 cards. Gym, ID, credit and transport card. Don't see why you need credit and debit card? What's the difference?

If you add corporate access & credit cards you can still fit all into this http://i01.i.aliimg.com/wsphoto/v0/1114436895_1/BMW-M-Slim-W... together with some cash.

Gift card for restaurants? It's that seriously a thing? What message are you supposed to get when you receive one, "I would like to offer you dinner but can't spare one hour to eat it with you"?

You've never heard of a raffle prize or a grab gift?

Never before today no

Yes, it's an American thing. In the US every retail entity that you interact with will offer you discounts to scan a plastic card in addition to your credit card (it allows them to trend you as a consistent customer for their data modeling, send you targeted advertising, and so on).

If you want to take advantage of these discounts, you build a significant stack of plastic.

As a question, what kind of percentage discount are you getting for this data exchange?

I'd guess on the order of 10%.

At a grocery store, selected items are discounted (usually to half off). At a restaurant, you might get every tenth meal free.

This really is something I don't get. I have a pretty busy digital and real life, and I really can't think of having more than a couple of CC (one Credit, one debt), an EC Karte and maybe a couple of cards for gym membership and (in this very moment) H&M giftcard. Even Apple Pay strikes me as a solution looking for a problem. Maybe that's a fundamental difference between the U.S. and Europe, but I really don't get the gist of all this "scrape the huge heap of card crowding your wallet" excitement.

After reading this thread I'm starting to think European companies use plastic far less than American ones. All I can say is live here for a year and you'll understand.

That's five or six cards. Combined with cash, coins, and temporary things like tickets and receipts -- that's a lot!

For loyalty cards, why not use passbook or equivalent?

I've got 12 cards in my wallet right now. Passbook accepts one of them. I'm unaware of any equivalents that would work with even a majority of them.

To pick a single example, in the UK Boots points cards have a pin in and need to be inserted into a reader.

There are apps, like KeyRing, which I use. The problem is unless the merchant has an optical scanner (many are still on laser) they can't scan your phone. So now you or the cashier has to type in a 12 digit number. If it's the cashier, you have to hand them your phone. It's annoying.

Passbook only supports 2d codes, not 1d codes (UPC-style codes) or mag stripes that you typically find on loyalty cards.

Good luck getting Lufthansa to accept a Passbook version of a United premier card.

But would you be able to find/remember all those cards if they were stored in this thing? Isn't it the pretty plastic and embossed pictures that scream "Barnes & Noble"? Would burying that inside a Plastc mean you never used them?

I have the opposite problem. I have more than I can carry on me, so they all end up in a heap in my dresser drawer. Then they never get used.

It serves the company's need to insert itself into the financial data stream. You know the story: "It's a $2 trillion industry - imagine if we just captured a fraction of that! Step 3: profit."

For users, this must be some retro fad jumping the gun. Given the value of the transaction data going through this thing, it should be free at worst.

I think it's safe to say they're charging for it because they haven't raised the money to develop and manufacture the thing.

Yeah, there's potential to use a device like this to build a service like Simple or Moven but without the need to force users to open a new account with you just to get the necessary data. They even showed the instant feedback alerts in the demo video.

Say you have 10k stolen cards...now its easy to carry them all.

"Flash Memory (up to 20 cards)"

Good luck with that.

So you're reducing the number of cards you have on you by 1/20.

If this thing is real, you could just have your phone "load" different cards to it.

I think this improves things, but I don't know why the focus isn't on a phone, which people are already carrying. In an ideal world, everything else I carry in my front pockets and wallet could be handled by my phone - keys, money, business cards, receipts, credit cards, loyalty cards, ID, etc.

It seems pretty solidly in the "luxury" column. This is particularly clear if you take a long view. It's likely that all physical credit cards are on their way out in favor of digitally distributed credentials. CC companies like you flashing their cards, but not as much as they like lowering fraud.

That being said, it's certainly attractive. If the 'bubble bursts' (whatever that means), I expect this is the kind of start up that will be first against the wall. Just remember frivolous != worthless.

For me, the remote-wipe ability is a killer app. Currently, when I lose a physical card, I have to go through a painful get-a-new-card procedure that involves going to my major websites and giving them my new card #.

With remote wipe, when I lose my card I just remote-wipe it and order a new one. Also, this card will warn me when I'm too far from it so I won't be as likely to leave it behind.

This can be avoided today by using one card for subscriptions and other recurring payments, and another card for physical purchases.

I do something similar already, where I never carry around the debit card associated with my primary checking account.

I should never use a debit card for anything anyway.

You have awful fraud protection and zero to near-zero rewards.

Banks will give you net-30 terms for no cost, reward you with many benefits, and give you fantastic protection from thieves AND retailers.

The big problem with debit cards is if you get it stolen then your money is taken. Sure you'd get it back eventually, but until them you don't have access to your own money and can't spend it.

That's weird. I live in a country where 95+% of all payments are done with debit cards, and I don't know anyone who ever had a problem with fraud.

Maybe debit cards are a bit better at security than "oh let's copy this number and put a fake signature on a piece of paper"? Even the mag-stripe version of our payment system that we have had here since '79 required online PIN verification.

We're working on this exact headache, and we believe it's a killer app. Plastc can't solve this problem for you - the moment your card is swiped or entered into a merchant form, it's vulnerable to being stolen and can't be solved with a "remote wipe." What's needed is the ability to make payments with multiple numbers. To silo your merchant relationships and restrict how a number can be spent. And to also to deactivate your physical card when you're far away from it. Never go through a painful get-a-new-card procedure again. We're called Final, and we're launching tomorrow. We'd love your thoughts.

That's essentially how Apple Pay works.

n is big, and depth-millimeters count for a lot in pocket world.

If you're a lady wearing jeans, this could make the difference in whether you need to bring a purse.

For me, it makes the difference re: whether I need to carry a wallet at all, or whether I replace it with a phone case that has a pocket for this and my drivers license.

This and Vessyl feel like the harbingers of Silicon Valley doom. Products that solve no meaningful problem and cost orders of magnitude more than their 'dumb' alternatives. A waste of good brains.

Is that satire? I'm not kidding... To a British mindset that video on https://www.myvessyl.com/ feels exactly like satire.

Sadly not. A cup that tells you what you just poured into it is a real product.

Their argument that knowing your hydration quotient is more important to fitness & wellbeing than knowing your calorie intake should get them pummelled. I don't care if they have an MD on their staff.

For a start if you care about health & fitness to a degree at all you simply wouldn't drink Red Bull, beer to any amount that it makes a difference. If you do it will be in a binge scenario.

I also use the same technique in debate by dealing with likely criticism by mentioning it and countering with a weak counter point. In this case that is the use of the app to enter drinks you would never pour into a horrid big bottle.

I also wonder about the tech they use to determine the liquid content. I'm gonna guess its not that clever. Using light analysis vs a DB of known drinks or something likely to be wrong.

My favourite part of the whole idea is that in order to get the data they say it helps you with, you'll need to carry your cup everywhere. To the bar. To bed. On vacation. Who would ever do that?

The parents of a one-year-old?

I'd love to see a one year old try to drink from a Vessyl.

> if you care about health & fitness to a degree at all you simply wouldn't drink Red Bull

bbbut some athletes drink Red Bull! And they sponsor sports...

It's like a parody of Apple product videos - "and we like to call it, the iCup!"

I actually like it, it provides a tiny amount of utility. If I was a multimillionaire I would buy it.

Fashion. Because it differentiates.

True. But if all Silicon Valley does these days is fashion then I'll still consider it dead.

Until it runs out of battery :-)

It's rechargeable.

They are targeting women with this device. Look at all the marketing materials. Female main characters, a woman is in the facial recognition part, 'you shouldn't buy this for yourself, buy it for your female wife', clothing shops & restaurants, etc.

The women in my life would find this incredibly useful. Several popular iPhone cases can hold a couple cards. This product would allow you to carry your phone, ID, and every other card in one compact package.

"buy it for your female wife"

...as opposed to your male, neuter, or enby wife, I suppose?

But the Apple watch is blessed by Jonny Ive Himself!

Smart watches aren't really as bad as this. They tell the time, like normal watches, and are cheaper than many normal watches.

Credit cards are different. They are small, thin, and never run out of batteries.

Agreed. Besides the minimal space required by using separate cards, my bank will replace my cards for free whenever they break or the stripes go bad, which happens every six months or so. Does Plastc do that?

Discover will give you a new CC every time you want to change the design on it, which you can choose from several. :)

In theory, this could enable one time use magnetic stripe data, which would solve many security problems. I could get this instead of waiting until all merchants support chip and pin (which is never going to happen in the US).

>I could get this instead of waiting until all merchants support chip and pin (which is never going to happen in the US).

It's going to be supported unless the merchant is happy eating fraudulent charges, which will make them a hotspot for people committing fraud. There's various dates for when that liability kicks in[1]. General trend is 2015 for PoS and 2017 for gas station pumps.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMV#United_States

Credit card companies could incentivize merchants to do so by offering better rates on chip and pin, or by only offering worse rates without it the next time a contract is renewed.

I thought the same thing about the new Apple Pay. I didn't consider the process of "take credit card from wallet and swipe" to be a massive inconvenience that needed to be turned into an app.

It commoditizes credit/debit/banking products, which isn't a bad thing.

How does actually commoditize banking products? It just reduces the number of cards that you may or may not have in your wallet, with may or may not be a real problem for a majority of people. My gut feeling as a tech guy with disposable cash is that this looks great and I'd love to have this as a cool toy, but honestly it does not fulfill any real daily need for the mass market or for general good.