MY CARD

MA CARTE

English Abstract

A retractable smart card as part of new Smart Phone designs will allow
customers to pay securely at POS using their phone. The chipped card is
encoded with a unique number in the cell provider's system which is linked
with the customers various accounts (debit, credit, loyalty etc). Customer
can choose account for payment using the interface on the phone and then
insert the card in the POS. More secure then contactless cards (RFID etc),
the PIN for this card is a finger or thumb print scan using the screen (or a
scanner on side/back of unit) while the card is inserted in the POS, standard
alpha-numerical PINS are optional.
The card is only visible when needed and is retractable into the phone via
virtual buttons on the phones interface.

Claims

Claims
The embodiments of the invention in which an exclusive property or privilege
is claimed
are defined as follows:
A smart phone is designed to allow for a retractable card, the card is
operated with a
single button on the side of the phone or a virtual button in the phones UI.
The smart card is equipped with both a mag swipe and smart chip technology.
If a user has previously reserved a hotel room they can use this card to
unlock their hotel
room instead of waiting in a line at front desk to receive a hotel key card,
this would be
done using an app. As part of the self check-in the App would encrypt and pass
the
number encoded on the mag swipe of the card to Hotel database, since the hotel
room
locks are connected directly to hotel DB the card will no unlock the specific
room, once
the reservation has expired the lock is reprogrammed per current Hotel process
and the
card will no longer open the door.
The card can also be used as a method of payment at a store level Point of
Sale similar to
current Debit, Credit, Gift/Loyalty cards. The phone carrier would need to
integrate with
major banks and credit cards to complete this functionality.
The would be more secure then current NFC technologies being tested in the
Google
Wallet since this is a hard connection with the card and POS, NFC is not as
secure since
the user is transmitting sensitive bank account details to the POS wirelessly
and its
possible for that signal to be picked up by a 3rd party.
The PIN is no longer required by Point Of Sale terminal however a PIN must be
entered
into the phone before the transaction can be completed. This PIN can be
alpha/numeric or
it can be a finger or thumb print scan directly on the screen of the phone or
using a sensor
on the side of the phone.
This would speed up payment processing time since the users thumb is already
on the
screen when the card is inserted into the POS and it scans automatically, also
eliminates
PIN entry error delays. A phone can be setup to accept multiple finger prints
if needs
(husband, wife, chid etc).
The Phone manufacture can also use the card as an Employee expense account, a
business bank account could be setup and linked to the phone. Online reporting
features
available to employers or parents who may use this feature to monitor
children's
spending.

Description

CA 02751512 2011-09-01
Description
This design is much more secure then current contactless payment options since
those
frequencies can be picked up remotely by 3rd parties, this is avoided due to
the contact
with the POS and Smart Phone Card, PIN is entered via traditional
alpha/numeric or new
finger/thumb scanner using the phone screen or additional scanner on side or
back of
unit. The card is encoded with a number and encryption unique to the cell
provider, this
unique number in the providers system can then be linked with multiple banks,
credit/debit cards, gift/loyalty cards and can also be used as a hotel room
card. For
example when a customer is on route to a hotel they could use an advanced
check in app
with gives their smart phone card access to the room previously reserved.
Gift cards could now be purchased virtually and loaded onto the customers
account (ie-
Future Shop, Best Buy etc) and could be redeemed at the store POS simply by
choosing
the specific gift card from the list of accounts linked with the card using
the phone UI (ie-
select Future Shop Gift card, insert card in POS and have finger scanned as
PIN to
complete payment.)
Cell provider may be required to develop drives for POS systems to accept this
new
phone card.
This design will reduce/remove the data entry step when customers are
enrolling in 3rd
party loyalty programs, instead of filling out long forms (online or paper
based) they can
simply choose to enrol using the 3rd parties app, clicking the "Enrol" button
will auto
populate the 3rd party merchants database with their basic contact info (name,
email,
address etc), the specific type of data used to auto populate these forms can
be defined in
advance for added security.
This new design will greatly reduce the amount of plastic cards (gift, bank
etc) going to
land fills every year since this one Phone Card will be linked to multiple
accounts.
Each Cell provider could design the chip on the card to appear like their
company logo
(Apple, Blackberry etc). This design would be available for "left" and "right"
handed
users, phone models could be designed to have the card extract from any side
of the
phone.