Credit cards: Mastercard Heralds The Future

It’s time to say goodbye to old credit cards: they have worked great for 50 years, but now we need new, more comfortable, faster, and safer technologies.

The pandemic that began in 2020 has disrupted the world of payments: less and less cash, resulting from fewer contacts, and more and more electronic payments, especially with credit and debit cards. Credit cards, for this reason, must evolve and adapt not so much to the present, for which they are still okay as they have shown in recent months, but for the future.

Mastercard is convinced of this, which, together with Maestro, is one of the two giants of cashless payments globally and has announced the beginning of a journey towards the credit card of the future. Which will be different from those we use today primarily for a detail that seems small, but it is not at all: it will no longer have the magnetic strip.

Just chips in the credit cards of the future, goodbye “swipe” and contactless welcome: “It is time to fully embrace the best features, which ensure that consumers can pay easily, quickly and with complete peace of mind, “said Ajay Bhalla, head of Mastercard’s Cyber ​​and Intelligence division. But when will all this happen? Also, in Italy.

Goodbye Swiping: Since When

Mastercard has announced that it will remove the magnetic stripe from its payment cards starting in 2024 and in “most markets “but did not specify which ones. Certainly, however, there will immediately be both the USA and Europe, and therefore also Italy.

What Changes For Users

The magnetic stripe in credit cards is an invention introduced by IBM in the sixties of the last century and, therefore, is now over 50 years old. Its purpose was to store information on the card and its holder to limit fraud to the detriment of banks and consumers.

Today, however, technology is light years ahead, and, unfortunately, both banks and scammers know how to use it. Therefore, much more robust systems are needed to limit fraud, and, fortunately, there are already: chips. The next step will be introducing biometric authentication in the credit card through a fingerprint reader similar to smartphones.

These new and safer credit cards already exist, but they are not yet widespread: they will allow the user to pay in a contactless mode without entering any PIN.

Finally, to further increase the security of cashless payments, “Enhanced Contactless” ( ECOS ) technology is coming, which applies robust encryption to transactions 3 million times more difficult to break than current technology.

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