A system and method for collecting and managing information taken from tokens, like credit cards and gift cards, includes a portable computing device (PCD). The PCD may support a token recognizer that may comprise hardware and/or software that may reside in memory of the PCD. The token recognizer may work in combination with a camera. The token recognizer may comprise a broad recognizer module and an optical character recognition (“OCR”) module. The camera of the PCD may capture images of one or more physical tokens. These captured images of the physical tokens may be processed by the token recognizer so that digital images as well as data provided by the physical tokens may be maintained in memory of the PCD for later presentation to the user. These later presentations on the PCD may be used for account management and for conducting transactions, such as making payment at a point-of-sale (POS) terminal.