If you’re attending the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, you’ll be able to make purchases there without carrying cash or credit cards. Instead, you can use a smart card, which vendors in and around the Olympics will be equipped to accept. The smart cards, issued by three participating banks in cooperation with Visa International, began appearing in Atlanta last month. The cards contain ICs supplied by Motorola.

To use one of the Visa smart cards, you insert it into a machine supplied to a merchant by one of the participating banks. The machine approves the transaction, debits the card for the purchase amount, and shows the resulting card balance. Each night, the machine sends the day’s transactions to Visa in batches. Visa then collects money from the issuing banks for purchases made with those banks’ cards. Finally, Visa pays merchants for the purchases by sending money electronically for credit to the merchants’ bank accounts.

Everyone benefits from the transactions. Merchants spend less time handling money and experience lower theft rates. Consumers don’t have to bother with cash and coins. In the future, they’ll even get the convenience of loading money into cards from their homes via either a PC or a special phone. Banks reduce costs by not having to deal with cash, plus they earn interest on unspent “money” in cards that’s actually still in the banks. Banks can also charge merchants fees and get additional revenue from advertisements printed on cards.

Three types of smart cards will be in use at the Olympics: a disposable, a stand-alone reloadable, and an enhanced-reloadable card. Each is best suited to different uses and different amounts of money.

A memory-chip-based disposable card comes with up to $100 stored in it; you buy the card, spend the money, and throw the card away. The card deducts values and can’t be reset. The disposable cards are handy for smaller transactions, such as subway rides, a cup of coffee, or meals.

A stand-alone reloadable card, as its name implies, lets you replenish your money supply from an automatic-teller-machine (ATM) card or a credit card. You load the appropriate card into an ATM, press the “load-stored-value-card” option, take out the ATM card, insert the stored-value card, and load it. This card uses a microcontroller and is good for larger purchases and long-term use.

The enhanced-reloadable card, used primarily by Atlanta residents with accounts at participating banks, can reload from a checking, savings, or credit-card account. It differs from a stand-alone reloadable card in that it contains a magnetic stripe. This feature allows customers to use the card as either a stored-value or an ATM card.

Smart cards are already in use at the home games of the Jacksonville Jaguars in Florida. Jaguar fans can buy a Spot Card, loaded with $20, $50, or $100 and use it to buy food, drinks, and souvenirs. The company that issues the cards expects to sell 100,000 of them during this season’s 10 home games.

A continent away, residents of the English town of Swindon, population 170,000, are also testing smart cards for use as money. Using ATMs and special telephones, participating card holders transfer money to their cards from their bank accounts. They then spend the money at stores that are equipped to accept the cards. The Mondex system was developed by National Westminster Bank, Midland Bank, and British Telecommunications (BT) and is distributed through Mondex International. The program debuted in July and now boasts more than 6000 card holders and 700 participating merchants. The cards contain ICs from Hitachi.

In addition to smart cards, the Mondex system includes a “wallet” that looks somewhat like a calculator. Like a smart card, a wallet contains a microchip and can store money. It can also transfer money to and from a smart card. So travelers, for example, can keep most of their money in a wallet in their hotel and carry a smart card, containing less money, for purchases.

The Mondex wallet also enables transfers of money from one person to another. One person simply loads his or her smart card into another’s wallet, and the wallet’s owner specifies an amount of money to transfer to the card.

The Mondex smart-card system is starting to move into North America. The Royal Bank of Canada and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, for example, are testing it for a commercial rollout expected next year. In California, Wells Fargo Bank is testing the system with employees, who can use Mondex cards for purchases at nine locations, including the company cafeteria and a nearby Walgreen’s.