Subscriber Identity Modules (SIM) cards and CashCards are just some of the few examples of cards that features a Contact Smart Card encoding. This technology has been made available for more than 2 decades due to it's ablility to store information more than a hundred times compared to magnetic stripes.

In contact smart cards, a microchip is integrated into the card. These microchips are usually one centimetre square in size, bearing several golden plates. They can be encoded to store information in a form of binary data, much like a computer. These microchips can store information and gets it's power source from the card reader itself. For contact smart card readers, the card is inserted into a slot in the reader, and the reader will be able to decode the binary data.