Magnetic stripe cards are the most widely used cards in the world, both in access control and banking and have been around since the 1960's. While other card technologies are forging ahead and gaining wide acceptance the magnetic stripe card, due to the shear number of bank cards, credit cards, loyalty cards and the like is still by far the most widely used card world-wide. There are two types of magnetic material used to form the magnetic stripe of a magnetic stripe card. Standard Credit Cards use 300 Oersted magnetic tape that is generally brown in colour. High Coercivity Cards use 4000 Oersted magnetic tape that is generally black in colour. (An oersted (Oe) is the CGS electro-magnetic unit of magnetic field strength 1 Oe = 103/4 p Am 1-).