http://www.cnet.com/news/stratos-smart-card-apple-pay-competitor-or-simple-stopgap/
Paying with a Stratos may not be as seamless as holding your iPhone near the register and using Apple Pay. Apple's mobile payments service lets iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus owners use their smartphones and their fingerprints to charge purchases to their credit cards just by holding their iPhone near a terminal. And while technologists rejoice at Apple Pay's security, only 6 percent of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus owners used Apple Pay as of March, according to market researcher InfoScout. Now so-called smart cards like Stratos, Coin, Plastc and Swyp have come on the scene. When coupled with a smartphone app, these devices – which cost around $100 – let users store and toggle among different payment cards on the fly. Cards are scanned in using a small card reader and managed with a smartphone app. Their pitch: A single all-purpose solution that melds modern networking and payments technologies for mainstream consumers.
That is, until the financial infrastructure catches up with Apple Pay, Google Wallet and other digital payments systems. That's because consumers and businesses still rely on credit card technologies and financial networks implemented decades ago. Credit and debit cards, and the terminals that accept them, are ubiquitous. Kiosks that work with Apple Pay or any competitors, are not. "There's this chicken and egg problem," said Thiago Olson, CEO of Stratos, based in Ann Arbor, Mich. According to Olson, mobile payment companies design products that few can use because a small minority of merchants will accept that. That, in turn, means few consumers adopt the new technologies.
Greg Rosen, an investor at New York-based venture fund Box Group, shares that point of view. Although he was an early preorder customer of Coin, which originally launched in November 2013, Rosen just got his hands on the finished product. He's used the card for three weeks now without any hiccups. "It would be awesome if every single merchant took Apple Pay," he said. But that's not the reality. "It's kind of crazy that we're in 2015 and we're still paying with cash and plastic, and we have a computer in our pocket." Until the computers in our pocket become the main way to pay, he has a Coin card.