Fear for your lives next summer

Surely it would make more sense to use Oyster cards- not everyone has a credit card.

With Oyster one could put the deposit on just like a top up for prepay, and it then reinforces that the hire bikes are part of an integrated transport network.

Also the Oyster card and reader tech already exists- no need to reinvent the wheel and it's got to be cheap now that they have been knocking it out for yonks.

Plus it would yield some interesting stats for transport planners as your Oyster card is trackable.

my take:
the Oyster card has been hacked and cloned. (if you had come to a certain security group in London a few months ago you could have seen a live cloning demo. it's very fast. PM me for details.)

The systems that the bike company will use are seperate and IMHO that is for good reason. I suspect (but I have no evidence as an outsider) they will join together when Oyster V2 happens 'in the future.'