As part of Mastercard’s plan to remove the 16-digit number from its credit and debit cards by 2030, Australia’s AMP Bank is rolling out the first numberless debit card for small businesses.
AMP, a mobile-first bank, is introducing the cards to both its small business and personal banking customers. Other Australian banks plan to launch similar cards over the next year.
Mastercard is promoting the cards as a way to provide AMP Bank customers with seamless and secure payment technology. It claims that removing the 16-digit number from debit cards will help stamp out identity theft and fraud. The traditional card numbers will be replaced with a mix of tokenization and biometric authentication.
Customers would still have physical cards for in-person payments, but Mastercard’s plan is to replace static 16-digit credit card numbers with tokens generated by the customer’s banking app, ensuring that actual card information is never shared. Roughly 25% of worldwide Mastercard transactions are already tokenized, and the company reports that these transactions are growing at a 50% year-over-year rate.
AMP customers are encouraged to use Face ID and fingerprint ID to access the debit card app. The bank also recommends recording a video selfie during sign-up to help prevent identity theft.
A Slow Rate of Development
Mastercard’s first numberless card isn’t technically the first of its kind, though the development of such products has been slow. In 2019, Mastercard partnered with Apple to launch an iPhone-integrated credit card that didn’t feature a traditional 16-digit number. At the time, the lack of a number wasn’t as noticeable, since the card largely functioned through the Wallet app. The physical card, which lacked both a number and a CVV, was seen more as a backup.
This shift toward numberless cards became more evident as other companies began to follow suit. After expanding to the UK, Chase introduced its first product: the Chase UK numberless debit card, which has yet to be launched in the U.S. Similar cards have also been offered in regions like Mexico and the Middle East.
However, the uptake of numberless cards across the industry has been slow. While some consumers may prefer the sleek esthetics of a card without numbers, the security benefits seem to have been overshadowed by other fraud-prevention measures.
“Numberless cards can help reduce fraud, but I don’t think it’s a key factor,” said Elisa Tavilla, Director of Debit Payments at Javelin Strategy & Research. “There are so many other security tools that exist today.”
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