The results of a recently commissioned survey, released on Wednesday, show that US and Canadian citizens are deeply interested in owning and using smart cards, and have a high level of empathy towards potential applications of this technology. The survey was commissioned by North America’s Smart Card Forum (SCF), an organization formed to accelerate the acceptance of smart card technology in the US and Canada. The key aims of the survey were to study how consumers perceive smart cards and to help the industry understand the potential size and shape of the future market. Using focus groups and a telephone survey covering 2,400 respondents, SCF found that three-quarters of those contacted expressed a genuine interest in the smart card concept (defined for participants as a card with a memory capable of holding any kind of information but requiring an input/output device). SCF’s President, William Barr, also told attendees at a conference in San Francisco that the technology has what he calls a core early-adopter constituency of around one third of the US and Canadian population. But as Barr readily admits, North Americans are some way behind their European counterparts in adopting smart cards, principally owing to the fragmented nature of many of the key potential markets which could benefit from the technology, such as banking and telecommunications. Barr also pointed to how expensive on-line credit card verification is in countries such as France when compared to the US, leading the French to adopt smart cards as an alternative. But Barr is undeterred by these obstacles. Referring to the surprisingly high (75%) of respondents who showed an interest, he said these numbers tell us that as an industry, we must extend our efforts beyond the classic early adopter community and connect with the majority of consumers… Some less surprising facts to emerge showed that those people interested in smart cards were more likely to already own a PC, were generally younger and were already carrying significantly more cards in their wallet (6.3 vs. 3.9) which they hoped to replace with fewer, smarter cards. Barr was also enthused by how easily Americans grasped the concept of a smart card and how they were inclined to think up original applications for the technology, generating more than a 100 between them in the survey. The most popular application assigned to the cards was as a single repository for carrying medical emergency (Med-Alert) and health insurance information. By comparison, a recent survey carried out in the UK by IDC on behalf of Compagnie des Machines Bull SA, revealed that 64% of a 1,000 strong sample were comfortable with the concept of electronic money. The survey went on to predict that by 2001, all bank cards in the UK will have been converted to smart cards. The UK is generally considered to be closer to the US model than the European model in terms of smart card adoption.
