Mastercard to end magnetic strip on cards

Technology Technology: In The News
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By 2033, none of its debit or credit cards will have a strip, with banks in many regions including Europe able to issue the strip-less cards from 2024.

The UK moved to chip-and-pin for all card payments in 2006, but in the US, some magnetic strip systems are still in use.

Mastercard says chip-and-pin and new biometric cards that use fingerprints, offer greater security. The firm claims to be the first payment network to phase out the technology.

A spokesperson told the BBC the level of global acceptance of chip-and-pin was such that the time was right to begin phasing out the magnetic strip. The slow phasing out is to leave what the firm calls a “long runway” for companies accepting payments to move to chip-and-pin.

The magnetic strip began life in the 1960s as an IBM project to create identity cards for CIA staff. Forrest Parry, one of its engineers, had the idea of sticking information encoded on a strip of magnetic tape to a plastic card, but was struggling to join the two together. It was Dorothea Parry, his wife, who hit upon the idea of using heat to join tape to card, initially with the iron she was using at the time.

But the pandemic, the company says, has highlighted the appetite for different ways to pay, increasingly consigning paying using the Parrys’ invention to the history books. Contactless payments which can be made using card or smartphone increased by more than one billion in the first quarter of 2021 compared with the same period last year.

The strip is another of the 1960’s ground-breaking technological inventions to reach end-of-life … :credit_card:

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I generally use my iPhone and Apply Pay these days - it’s so convenient, you just need to take you phone with you :lol:

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I use Google Pay on my phone - it’s actually more secure than a physical card … as, indeed, Apple Pay is … :grinning:

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I use it mostly for convenience - most of us take our phones everywhere, and especially hand on something like a night out where you don’t want to have to worry about your wallet and your phone …while being half intoxicated :lol:

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True … :heavy_check_mark:

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Where did you get that tick from?? :eyes: Did you get THAT on your watch too?? :laughing:

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I got it from the box of ticks … :card_file_box:

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I saw you change that…so its a box of tricks then? haha! :smiley:

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First you see it … :card_file_box: … then you don’t …
:man_shrugging:

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I notice my kids all pay this way but my current phone doesn’t have NFC, it is the first phone I have had for years without it. though to be honest even if it did I like using my cards because I use a different card for different payments.

Have often wondered how long the magnetic strip would continue because even on the very rare occasions when the contactless machine refused to recognise my card it has used the chip contacts rather than the magnetic strip as a backup.

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