New All In One Card: Stratos Review

Update: According to Techaeris Stratos is going out of business.

There are a lot of All In One cards that are currently being developed (Coin, Plastc, Wallby & Swyp), none of these have actually reached the market yet but there is a lot of anticipation, hype and a lot of venture capital dollars at stake.

The idea of an All In One Card is that rather than carrying multiple credit cards, loyalty cards and various other cards that you just carry one and this one card will contain all the data you need. There are lots of cool things that are possible to do once you have this set up (e.g “If shopping at a grocery store, use this credit card”). There is a new competitor in the market and it’s called the Stratos card.

How It Works

As we mentioned earlier, this card isn’t actually available yet. They are hoping to start shipping the cards April of 2015. That being said, the Stratos website does explain how the card will work so for now we will have to take them at their word.

Basically how Stratos works is this, they give you a Stratos reader which plugs into your mobile smart phone (via the audiojack). You then scan all of the credit, debit, gift, loyalty and membership cards that you have. This information is then encrypted and stored on your phone (it is not uploaded to the Stratos servers. Although they are legally required to check that the contact information matches).

You then select up to three cards that you want to load onto the Stratos card (you can switch out these cards at any time without having to load the app). When you want to use one of the cards that’s stored on your Stratos card you tap the card (against any hard surface) and hold onto one of the buttons (which is associated with one of the three cards you have loaded onto the card) while you swipe your card.

This sounds kind of clunky, but it’s much easier to see how this card works in practice so I’d recommend watching the video below.

 

The Cost

The Stratos card isn’t cheap, the cost is $95 per year or you can get two cards for $149.

Security

There are a number of security features that Stratos has.

• Lock down mode. If you lose/leave your card somewhere, you can open up the app and lock it so that others cannot use the card.  You can also set up automatic alerts/shut downs (e.g if my card is away from my phone for more than 5 minutes, automatically lock it)
• Encrypted data. As mentioned before, none of your card details are stored on the Stratos server, they are encrypted using bank level encryption and kept on your phone.

EMV Chip

This card does not come with an EMV chip and is not EMV chip compatible. Stratos have said that they have a “plan” for dealing with EMV chip technology. One of the problems is that Stratos gives you an updated card once every year (on your card member anniversary), this means if you get the card in April when it’s released and they add EMV functionality in June you won’t get the EMV compatible card until April the following year.

In October of this year there is a fraud liability shift, which basically means that whoever has the weaker technology (out of the card issuer and merchant) is liable for any fraud that occurs. Because of this more transactions will move to requiring an EMV chip to be processed. Because Stratos won’t work for these transactions, it won’t be as convenient as advertised as you’ll need to carry back up cards that do have an EMV chip.

Referral Program

Stratos offers a referral program for every person you refer you’ll receive a discount of $15. There is a limit of seven referrals for the one year membership or 10 for the two year membership. I don’t have a referral link for this product, but you check the comments section to help out other readers.

Final Thoughts

I have a number of problems with these all in one cards which Stratos also hasn’t solved:

• None of them have actually shipped yet. There have been increasing delays, which is never a good sign especially when there are a lot of pre-orders at stake and no way to get a refund.
• They aren’t EMV chip + PIN compatible. When fraud liability changes in October you’ll see the majority of merchants quickly change to requiring an EMV chip to be present to reduce their liability when it comes to fraud.
• They are prohibitively expensive. I don’t think an all in one card is worth $95 a year (or even $100 upfront), especially when mobile payment applications essentially do the same thing without charging you and are more convenient.

I’d strongly urge readers to wait and see what these products are like when they’ve actually been shipped so we can get some real user views. I think there will be a lot of teething problems and it seems crazy to launch without EMV functionality (and I’m skeptical that they will be able to be compatible with EMV in the first place).

I do like the look of Stratos and the marketing video is very well put together, I’d be surprised if they didn’t ship on time but I’d prefer to take a cautious approach to this type of thing. One thing I find particularly interesting is the fact that you can load gift cards onto this card and the Stratos card has your full name on it. This could be particularly useful for manufactured spending purposes.

Personally I’ll be waiting until they have a card that will work for EMV transactions. What are your thoughts on the Stratos card? Have you ordered one? Will you? Let me know in the comments below.