[Wanted:] Gravacard – Gravatar for debit card details

April 1, 2011

If you’re like me and you tend to be a “serial joiner”, then you’ve probably got accounts on most social networking sites, and – I’m guessing – you’ve uploaded your carefully chosen avatar to each one, too. Or, you’re smart and you use Gravatar, which allows you to upload your avatar once, where it gets propagated to each of the services that support it. Want to change your avatar; simple: update your avatar on Gravatar and the update gets pushed out.

At the end of last month, my debit card expired and until now, I hadn’t realised just how many online/subscription-based services I use which depend on that card number. Services which would stop working when the card expired. I must have spent the best part of a morning working out which services had my debit card details and then visiting each to update the number.

Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a service, like Gravatar, where I could enter my card details once and have that propagate to all the services that needed it? I see the major challenges facing a service like this as:

• Trust – it would be hard for a start-up to offer this, because who would trust their debit/credit card details with an organisation they’d never heard of
• Proliferation – tied into the first point. If, say, Paypal offered this, it would quickly gain traction because they’re a recognised brand
• Security – goes without saying. Any service that stores credit card numbers better be as secure as they come, especially if that data is being fed into other places. (And maybe that’s the showstopper?)

Perhaps Paypal is the answer, and if more services supported Paypal as a payment method, this would solve the problem – I could update my details there and have done with it.

Posted in applications, software, tech