A bunch of tech heavyweights led by America Online founder Steve Case officially launched a new credit card today called the RevolutionCard. It offers two main claims to being revolutionary: (1) it has no cardholder name or account number on the front, for greater security, and (2) it will make credit card transactions less costly for merchants. That's pretty much it, as far as I can tell, so I'm missing the revolution part.

The RevolutionCard has late fees and over-the-limit fees comparable to other cards, and according to its Web site it can have an interest rate of over 29%, depending on your credit (to be fair it can also have a rate of under 8%, which is very good). None of that seems revolutionary.

It looks nice, although it reminds me of the soap shape that several manufacturers adopted when they wanted to give you less soap for the same price.

The security features are good; you have to use a PIN number with every purchase, so no one could steal your card and just go out for a night on the town. While that's a good thing in that it will save you some hassle, the truth is that current credit cards don't charge you more than $50 if your card is stolen, and most don't charge anything. So it's not that big of a feature unless you're really paranoid about identity theft (which I'm not, so I might have a bias).

The real "revolution" here is actually for the merchants who accept this card (reportedly at 100,000 or so already). The RevolutionCard is offering a much lower interchange rate to merchants-that's the rate merchants have to pay every time you use your credit card. If the Revolution Card only charges them 0.5% on purchases where they're currently paying 1.9% (the amount quoted by RevolutionCard, not sure how accurate that is), then merchants will want it to be used, and they'll encourage its use.

The RevolutionCard wants you to think that what's good for the merchants will be good for you, but I'm not so sure. From everything I've read about merchants such as gas station owners, they're bitter over credit card fees, but they seem to believe they should be pocketing that money, and I don't know that they would be "passing the savings on to you," as the saying goes.

What say you? Is a revolution afoot?