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As someone who frequently travels all over Africa, I would want a secure password on this. If this card gets stolen without such a password it would mean the thieves can empty out several of my cc accounts.

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If they don't mess up the implementation then it would appear to be more secure than traditional cards. Especially in places like Africa (I assume) and the US where Chip and Pin has yet to be rolled out.

I appreciate the point you're making in that stealing this one card is equivalent to stealing a whole wallet-full. But isn't it usually the case that you lose the whole wallet in one go?

The difference is when I travel I don't take all my cards out with me, I would leave at least 2 backups in the hotel safe and another at home which can get sent to me in an emergency. Realistically imitating this behaviour on such a device probably won't happen.

Actually, according to this worldwide map of card and terminal EMV deployment, Africa/ME had chip & pin tech, as of Q4 2013, in 38.9% of cards and 86.3% of terminals.

http://www.emvco.com/images/EMVCo_WorldMap-9-2014.png

The other regions are:

(Region/percentage of cards/percentage of terminals)

Americas (excluding USA): 54.2 84.7 Europe: 81.6 99.9 Australasia: 17.4 71.7 Russia: 24.4 91.2

That's fantastic! Thanks for the information and apologies for making assumptions (dangerous things!).

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