Plastc is “in talks with major issuing banks” to roll out a white labeled single issuer card for partnering banks, CEO Ryan Marquis told Bank Innovation.

This move shows both an unexpected interest in this type of card from banks, and a new business model for a somewhat troubled product line.

Troubled? Stratos ran out of cash. Coin pivoted. Swyp is supposed to launch this summer. Plastc’s own card will ship in August or September, but the bank angle adds a new wrinkle. Bank-branded Plastc cards will lock the chip for bank credit and debit use, and open up non-EMV use to store cards , gift cards and the like. Here’s Marquis:

The EMV portion of Plastc will be reserved for banking partnerships. So, financial institutions will be able to lock down the debit and credit cards to their institution, allowing them to use EMV module, but at the same time leaving the gift card and loyalty card portions wide open for users.   

The goal is to roll out the first private label cards by the end of the year, Marquis said. The prospective bank partnerships are undisclosed for now, but Plastc will be marketing the technology to all FIs interested, with no “exclusive” partners at launch.  

The universal card already has the hardware necessary to support both EMV and NFC payments, the company said. In fact, just last week Plastc teamed up with San Francisco-based Fit Pay to allow for contactless payments at launch. Fit Pay’s platform uses tokenization to enable NFC payments, which, Marquis said, adds the necessary layer of security.

I think we can all agree there is a transition going on from a card to a mobile wallet, but that takes a lot of retraining on the customer side. That’s why we chose the route of all-in-one card: users still need to download the digital wallet on their smartphones to use Plastc, but they will still be using a familiar plastic card at POS. We have a long way to go before cards are completely eliminated.

First shipments of Plastc are expected to begin in August/September, after being delayed from the original summer 2015 launch date.

Here’s a quick demo of the Plastc card.