The other day, I was browsing through a copy of a smart card magazine, which featured awards for card personalization. I could not but marvel at the ever-advancing combination of high degree of technological sophistications and well crafted artworks. Surely Issuers are proud of their cards and rightly so. Or should they be?
The industry has long promised that Issuers of multi-applications smart cards will have a bright feature. The added benefits of multi-applications will attract Cardholders to Issuer. Through advanced secure mechanisms Issuers are able to rent smart card space to 3rd party. This in turn should increase the services that Cardholders could enjoy.
Potential users are like the nymph Echo with Narcissus, they are attracted by the beauty of those cards, but unable to articulate their real needs and desires. Users and Issuers send messages to each other but don’t actually listen or communicate. Users and Issuers voices are echoing to each other but without proper progress being made. Issuers like Narcissus might become more concerned by their image and finally neglect their users leaving them unsatisfied. Third-party users become shy to rent space on such cards, as any positive service they could offer would likely reinforce the image of those cards and hence benefit more to the Issuer than to themselves.
In the end, the Issuers’ businesses do not prosper as they could. As in the tale told by Ovid, this could mean for many Issuers that they would struggle or least their multi-application smart cards scheme would starve. In the tale a beautiful flower grew where Narcissus died, so there is hope that other actors could take the place of the Issuers, and new offering would grow from this.
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