Mastercard is planning to introduce numberless cards and single-use card numbers as part of its efforts to reduce fraud.
Mastercard New Zealand country manager Megan Simons said scammers used stolen credit card details to defraud New Zealanders of $84 million in the year to November.
“It’s up to all of us, particularly those in our industry, to do what we can to try and address that and reduce the number,” she said.
“You’ve got this dual-sided equation where people want the best and smoothest, nicest experience, but they expect it to be safe, and I think that’s a pretty fair expectation … if security measures are onerous, people just don’t use them.”
“You can’t have one without the other; you can’t have security in a terrible experience, and you can’t have an amazing experience that it’s not safe. That’s ultimately what we are trying to solve.”
Simons said that by 2030, Mastercard plans to roll out physical cards without the traditional 16-digit number, a move she said would strengthen security.
She said a number of New Zealand organisations have already begun rolling out the change.
“The new Sharesies card doesn’t have a number on the front of it. The Square One kids’ card … also doesn’t have a number on the front.
The change is seen as important because if a physical card is lost, it prevents someone from using the printed number on it to make online purchases.
“If you think about it, you have that number, you have the code on the back, you have the expiry date, you can go and plug it into a website and use it. So that’s pretty fundamentally important.”
“If you want to access your card number, you still can. You just go into your banking app and authenticate yourself with your Face ID or your fingerprint like you would normally, and then you access the number there … you still have all the functionality; it’s just secured in a much safer way than having the most important piece of information out in the open on a card.”
She said Mastercard would also introduce one-time-use card numbers for individual transactions, adding an extra layer of security for payments.
“Imagine you’re in a situation where you’re going to go and shop on a website that you’ve never shopped at before; you might not want to put your card number in there.”
“What you could do is go into your banking app and say, ‘I want to use a single-use virtual card number.’ It’ll spin up a number for you; you put that number in and you make your transaction. It will never work again, that number.”
“Even if the details get compromised later down the track, the number becomes useless.”
She said it would also be possible to issue cards that work for a set period of time, allowing travellers to use them while abroad, with category restrictions and spending limits.
Mastercard is also planning to let customers use a single card across different payment types, including debit, instalment plans, credit, and prepaid, and is working to enrol cards in a “click to pay” system that would eliminate the need to manually enter card details at checkout.
Instead, transactions would be approved using biometric authentication such as a fingerprint or Face ID.
Simons also said Mastercard is working on “agentic transactions,” where AI could identify needs such as inventory gaps for small businesses and automatically place orders, as well as assist with cash flow management, bookings, and maximising loyalty benefits for customers.