Brilliant smart multi-card

CSR has drawn our attention to what could be a new product category: a “smart multi card” or “all-in-one smart card”. Basically, it is a connector between credit cards and smart devices, such as your phone.

The idea is to reduce the amount of cards needed in your wallet by registering up to 30 cards in once place. This includes credit and debit cards as well as the likes of public transport travel - supporting magnetic and near field communications (NFC), one time password (OTP) and also security door keys.

The Cambridge-based company - recently acquired by Qualcomm - highlights its CSR1013 Blueetooth Smart chip technology as a key factor in the design. The Brilliant Card - made by Korean startup BrilliantTS - obviously has to come in the standard form factor to work in the wider world. It has to be a standard "EMV" (Europay, Mastercard, Visa) card, to make it compatible with existing point-of-sale and ATM systems.

Measuring 0.35mm, the CSR1013 is the thinnest Bluetooth Smart System on a Chip (SoC) available in a 2.4mm x 2.6mm Wafer Level Chip Scale Package (WL-CSP), Mark Cullum, Product Marketing Manager at CSR explained to us.

As well as the small size (down from 0.6mm from previous offering ins the product family), the Bluetooth 4.1 low-power requirements were essential, too, he said. There's also 128KB of memory.

Yes, there's an associated app for configuring the multi-card (I'm not clear, tough, the exact process for loading up the card details onto the multi-card).

A glimpse of the underlying smart multi-card technology

"Customers often need to carry multiple cards around with them, which adds an element of frustration when shopping. We wanted to make this all-in-one card thinner and improve the overall consumer experience," said Jaehun Bae, CEO at BrilliantTS. "To make this possible we needed to develop a card which was the same size as a standard EMV card and did not need to be constantly charged. CSR1013 helped us to achieve this with the built-in security that Bluetooth Smart provides."

Why bother, you may say? The Bluetooth Smart angle enables another level of security to be overlaid over use of the phone. The user can configure the card to require - through Bluetooth Comms - the entry of a secondary PIN number to confirm the transaction.

What if you leave your all-in-one card behind? Bluetooth - through the use of the PXP proximity profile, presumably - enables alerts to be raised to your phone if you are a certain distance from the phone.

Another security angle is that while magnetic cards can store all kinds of data in their strip, which is permanently stored, the Brilliant card's strip does not record information. "[The data] appears only in use and is automatically erased upon swipe. Therefore there are no security concerns," says BrilliantTS CTO Byeong-cheol Jung in the video below.

The user interface is nice and simple - you use the up and down arrow buttons to select the "card" you wish to use.

It's not clear yet when, or if, these cards will be available in the UK.

I've already confessed my liking for slim wallets, so I think this is an excellent idea. But more importantly, what do you think? Leave a comment below.