
Apple Passbook
I’ll admit that I’m a fan of the iPhone and iOS. If you asked me 10 years ago I would have said Microsoft all the way but not these days. Anyway, since I travel so much for work I have a new fondness for Passbook. The cool thing about Passbook is that it stores my credit cards for Apple Pay, my boarding passes when I fly on American Airlies, my Walgreens card for getting points (how do you accumulate points anyway?), and some of my rewards cards for hotels and other airlines to let me know how many points I have to burn.
I think this fuctionality should be extended to drivers licenses and insurance cards because I am really never without my phone when I go out of the house but there are instances where I have forgotten my wallet or I’ve taken out key cards (like said license and insurance cards when I hop on my motorcycle) and forget to put them back in my wallet only to discover when I’m out that I don’t have them on me. My most recent trip to DIsney is a good example. The day before I took out my license, primary insurance card (I have 3 cards because of regular health, prescription, and vision) and my credit card since I didn’t feel like lugging around my entire wallet. The next day I went up to DIsney to cheer on my wife and daughter in their respective runDisney races. When we stopped for lunch pulled out my wallet and noticed that my cards were missing when I was going to pay. Luckily I have another card that I use a lot less frequently so crisis was averted for lunch and the weekend but it still underscores how useful it would have been to have those cards as part of Passbook.
Insurance cards shouldn’t be difficult by any measure since most doctors offices just need a few numbers off the card itself and if they used the security of Touch ID like on the iPhone 5 and later, the numbers can be hidden until the phone is unlocked or your fingerprint recognized like when I go to Whole Foods to get some groceries. I’ve heard that some states are debating digital drivers licenses and I think it would be a good thing for the state of Florida to adopt it. Keep the regular drivers license for those that dont use iPhones or smart phones in general but give people the option of using their phones instead. For a frequet traveler like me that would be totally awesome since I could probably leave my wallet at home unless I felt like carrying around cash.
Come to think of it, places like BJ’s and Costco should let members use their phones in this manner as well since using that stupid card all the time is kind of redundant. Walgreens has no problem using Passbook so I can attempt to get rewards points so it shouldn’t be a far stretch for these places to use it as well. BJ’s alread supports Apple Pay so its not a big reach to make the membership card digital as well.
I’m hoping that something like this will be a reality soon, it would make it simpler for a lot of people that want to go cashless (if it wasn’t for the cards I needed, I could leave my wallet home already!). Besides going cashless has its perks since I get rewards points with my credi card. The linchpin will be state and federal governmen accepting digital ID’s as a valid form of identification at places like airports or government buildings etc. If they could make the Global Entry card digital and a valid thing that would be awesome too and I would’t have to risk losing my license every time I took it out of my wallet to go through security. I’ll probably be waiting for a long time until this happens but until then I can certainly hope that insurance companies and the government will see that the entire planet is moving digital and these silly plastic cards are not necessary any longer.