An Overview of Smart Card Technology and Markets

As part of the Payment Cards Center's series of discussion papers, this paper provides an overview of smart card technology and its potential for significantly increasing payment card functionality. In addition to reviewing the current market for smart cards in the U.S., this paper examines the costs and barriers associated with their wide spread adoption. European and US smart card acceptance is compared. In addition, this paper provides background on the technological and infrastructure developments behind smart cards, a discussion of current smart card applications, and a review of smart card adoption in banking.