CARDS COULD THIN OUT WALLETS FULL OF PLASTIC.

Byline: Cathy Taylor Orange County Register

The bankers and techies are fiddling with your wallet again.

They want to take all your plastic cards - employer ID, credit card, phone card, Social Security card, bank account numbers and even your Blockbuster card - and meld it into one all-purpose mega-card of cards.

They want you to build a slender digital wallet, a one-card electronic purse to carry into the marketplace and around the world.

That could mean no more loose change jingling in your pocket - you pay for even the smallest purchases with a card.

Or no more calling the airline for your frequent-flier tally - it's stored right in that microchip on your card.

Or you might need only to show your card to a pharmacist next time your prescription expires - all the data will be right there, on your card.

This was one key message from CardTech SecurTech, the electronic money trade show held at Atlanta's Inforum last week. It was a message nearly lost altogether, given the bright lights that shone on one of the show's 342 exhibitors, Comparator Systems of Newport Beach.

Media, investors and the curious came to look at the tiny company whose stock traded more shares than any other in U.S. history. Many wanted to see, too, if Comparator had a real fingerprint verification product and if, indeed, it was operating in a viable industry.

Rest assured, bank cards and new-fangled personal identification is a very real industry. One proof is in attendance at the CardTech show - an estimated 6,000 people came, up from 360 at the first CardTech gathering in 1991 - and the caliber of exhibitors.

For every tiny shop pitching its magnetic stripe card was a Polaroid, Kodak, Diebold, Schlumberger, IBM or Motorola. Another validation lay in the recent initiatives by some of the nation's largest banking, security and electronics companies.

To their way of thinking, technological advances have finally become cheap enough and reliable enough to start to implement, in preliminary steps, everything from smart cards to smart TVs.

``What's driving a lot of this are the consumers themselves,'' said Catherine Allen, president of the Santa Fe Group consulting firm and former Citicorp executive. ``Consumers are tremendously time-sensitive and convenience-oriented. They are looking for new methodologies to do what they need to do.''

To get the whole movement rolling, the big players are fast rolling pilot programs in domestic and foreign markets to find out what consumers want and how they react to the idea of electronic money.

Chase Manhattan bank recently completed a trial in Australia and will participate in a New York City test, with MasterCard, Visa and other banks, in the fall.

Visa International, in conjunction with three Georgia banks, launched a bank card test last week in Atlanta, tied to the Summer Olympic Games.

The new product, called Visa Cash, is a bank card with an embedded microchip that stores money as electronic value, in denominations of $10, $20, $50 and $100.

How does Visa Cash work? You purchase a card at either a bank branch or a special vending machine. You use this at retailers who have signed up and have special terminals - in Atlanta that includes Chick-fil-A, Burger King, most gas stations and all Olympic concessions - and make a purchase.

You put the card in a terminal slot, verify the transaction and press a button to deduct the purchase amount.

Consumer advantages: quicker transaction, no loose change, increased sense of security, Visa believes. If you lose it, you lose only the value left on the card.

``We are trying to leverage the technology for practical applications for consumers,'' said Una Somerville, senior vice president for Visa International.

``Visa Cash is positioned as a cash alternative for the low-volume transaction and attacks a niche we feel is under-served by credit and debit cards,'' she said.

This is how, bankers believe, consumers will get used to handling electronic money, and pave the way for offering more sophisticated card products down the line.

You see, the bank makes little, if any, profit on these stored value cards, as they are called. They will benefit from the ``float'' - the unspent value of the card is held by the bank - that can be invested.

But what the banks really see as the gold mine is the next phase, when services such as paying your bills, storing medical information and more can be handled using your microchip and home computer. That's where the lucrative fees are.

And banks intend to benefit by establishing loyal relationships with consumers, which they can then market to other companies.

In the meantime, Somerville says consumers can expect these first-step cards, depending on the outcome of the Atlanta pilot, to be distributed widely in the next two to three years. MasterCard and several banks are running a similar test in New York City later this year.

Intense interest in the smart card and its potential can be traced to a convergence of events in just the past 18 months or so - enabling technology that is fast improving and becoming ever-cheaper, security measures that are being developed from a variety of sources, and consumers who seem more willing to ``go electronic.''

The new smart card, with its microchip, is much different from the old card with its magnetic stripe. The old card was passive, with no capability for interactivity. It was far from fraud-proof, with phony charge transactions gobbling up about 5 percent annually of total credit card charges.

But the new card? It is a portable data carrier that contains self-diagnostic and self-programming intelligence. It can interact with compatible computers or special terminals.

To protect information on cards, the issuers build in some security on the microchip itself. And to further forestall fraud, the big bank companies are looking to the latest advancements in biometrics, which relies on each person's unique characteristics to verify the card user's identity. Fingerprints are a common example of biometrics, though systems are being introduced for face, hand and even retinal identification.

MasterCard announced last week that it will begin testing a fingerprint ID system that might be rolled out worldwide to help stop credit-card fraud. The card holder will be asked to match his or her fingerprint against the one encoded numerically on the card before beginning a transaction.

MasterCard expects to greatly reduce losses due to credit card fraud, which hit $450 million last year, or 9 cents of every $100 in charges.

Such a program could not have been announced two or three years ago - the technology for fingerprint comparison, though widely used in law enforcement - was neither fast, accurate or reliable enough to handle the millions and millions of fingerprints in a mass consumer market. And consumers resisted the idea of being identified by fingerprint; a reluctance that seems to be abating.

This whole market could swing another way, too. IBM, for instance, would like to sell you what they call a ``Business Card'' service where you store your personal data on a card from its newly formed consortium called Versit, which includes Apple, AT&T and Siemens. The idea is the consumer, not a bank, adds to his card chip the services he or she selects - credit cards, telephone services and so forth.