It's a nice idea (inserting the card widthways), but it's completely over-engineered. It's never going to be used as a retro-fit - it looks too much like a skimmer. In fact, if they became commonplace, it would make fitting skimmers that look like this device so much easier than trying to hide a skimmer in a discrete housing.
Instead, allowing the card to be inserted widthways, and pulling it into the ATM as normal, then within the ATM read the card either by moving it sideways into a normal card reader (so that the card moves left, rather than forward), or more likely, a reader where the head moves across the magstripe as the card is held in place.
Anyway, as has been pointed out by another poster, chip-and-pin makes magstripes effectively obsolete, I imagine the magstripe is only included for backwards compatibility.
In the Netherlands they're already outfitting ATMs and other credit machines with addons on the outside. Most ATMs also display a picture on the screen of what it's supposed to look like. So no, it's not that over engineered I think.
On the other hand, because of the moving parts involved it is probably going to be much more expensive. And with the current chips on the card already, I don't think the banks are going to invest in those things as it simply will not provide them with enough ROI.
Even better, the Dutch railways (NS) employ an add on that requires you to insert your card sideways, and then push it in. Solving the problem in the same fashion, yet not requiring any weird over-engineered rotation system.
> In fact, if they became commonplace, it would make fitting skimmers that look like this device so much easier than trying to hide a skimmer in a discrete housing.
It's sad, but this was my very first thought as well.
Instead, allowing the card to be inserted widthways, and pulling it into the ATM as normal, then within the ATM read the card either by moving it sideways into a normal card reader (so that the card moves left, rather than forward), or more likely, a reader where the head moves across the magstripe as the card is held in place.
Anyway, as has been pointed out by another poster, chip-and-pin makes magstripes effectively obsolete, I imagine the magstripe is only included for backwards compatibility.