Plastc Shuts Down All-in-One Payment Card, Leaves Crowdfunders Baffled

A while back, Plastc was advancing a noteworthy concept in the mobile payments field: a kind of universal payment card system that could take all those separate debit and credit cards that people have and keep them filed in one kind of master, all-in-one payment card system.

At least, it would, until the company shut its doors for good and turned its crowdfunding investment into what amounted to a money pit.

The company had raised almost $10 million total via crowdfunding over two separate funding rounds, and three years after it launched, the company cut out. Perhaps worst of all, the company had roughly 80,000 preorders, with each card running around $155 total.

Plastc, for its part, noted that “without the necessary capital to continue, all employees have been let go, which means that Customer Care and Social Media channels are unmanned or have been shut down.” Additionally, the company was “disappointed and emotionally distraught,” assuring its now-bereft backers that “…we did everything we could to make Plastc Card a reality.”

With around $10 million in backer funding now largely up in smoke and with nothing more than apologies and emotional distress on the maker’s part, that’s likely much of the reason some are looking at lawsuits.

Still, it’s a good idea on the surface; we’re talking about a platform that allows users to condense all their payment cards into one handy interface. It could even potentially be designed in a fashion where hacking was difficult at least or next to impossible at best, and if such a development were achieved, that would have made the payment card a major alternative once more.

With so many mobile wallets and mobile payment systems in play, though, the payment card these days is almost an afterthought. A system like Plastc would have made it much more a contender, though given that Plastc wasn’t the first to try and fail at such a proposition, it’s a safe bet that we may not see such an advance take place for some time. Especially since there are a whole lot of burned crowdfunders who likely won’t be willing to chip in for the next attempted development.