With LG's White card, tech companies get into the payments game

After the universal remote, the universal credit card. LG announced last year that it was working on a new payment product, and tech fanboys expected it would follow the well-trodden path of Apple Pay and Samsung Pay.

 

Turns out, that mayn’t be the case at all. Korea IT News says LG’s cunning plan is to take on the banks with what’s being dubbed a universal credit card.

 

The White Card, as it’s being referred to, is along the lines of a mobile wallet, and will replace the numerous bits of plastic each of us carries around. LG reportedly wants to launch it at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this month and has ordered about 50,000 cards.

 

How LG’s system works

 

The card is the size of a standard payment card, but comes with a small low-power LCD, a connector array and two buttons. Users can toggle between accounts using the two buttons, and check which card they’re using on the display. The buttons also enable the card to be locked as protection while travelling or in high-risk countries.

 

Unfortunately, it’s one more thing to hook up to a charger – the connector ensures the card stays juiced up, but there’s no word yet on how often we’ll need to plug our wallets into the wall. Hopefully, at least this will take care of the odd situation where credit cards lose their magnetic properties because they’ve been held too close to smartphones.

 

Universal credit cards aren’t new, though. Smaller players such as Coin, Plastic and Swyp and Plastic have tried their hand at it, but have had limited success. Coin, in fact, needed to send customers a second card because the first malfunctioned.

 

Just how safe the product is remains to be seen. Convincing users that their data will not be compromised is a big job – as is getting people to move from one established system (the chip-and-pin authentication) to another.

 

There’s no official word from LG as yet; the company hadn’t responded to our request for a comment at the time of publication.