Payment cards are facing changes. Here's what you need to know
Will your printed number on your payment card soon be a thing of the past? Changes are getting closer. Mastercard has just announced that it will be able to detect that your card number has been compromised before it even gets into the hands of a cybercriminal.
Mastercard integrates artificial intelligence with its fraud prediction technology in its latest software update. The company hopes that it will be able to detect even faster which cards have been stolen by a fraudster, which will enable banks to replace them before they are used by cybercriminals.
Artificial intelligence will allow us to find out where your credentials were compromised. How can we identify the circumstances of the incident and how to remedy the situation very quickly. So that it doesn't spread on a larger scale (…) We can now actively contact banks to make sure that we serve this consumer and provide him with a new card immediately so that he can use it without interruption.
– said Johan Gerber, vice president of cyber innovation at Mastercard.
AI will protect our cards and money
Mastercard with this update, it will be able to use different patterns and contextual information such as geographical location, addresses and time. It will also be possible to link to incomplete and damaged credit card numbers in databases. Thanks to this, cardholders will be able to replace their card with a new one more quickly.
On the other hand, it will also be possible to use batches of damaged cards to detect potentially vulnerable merchants and payment processors. AI's pattern recognition goes beyond what humans could achieve using standard methods.
There are lots of stolen cards online
It turns out that there are billions of stolen credit cards circulating online criminals have no difficulty in purchasing such a card. They were stolen from merchants or unsuspecting customers who used their cards at the wrong gas station, online retailer or ATM. Such cards are difficult to identifysometimes it takes weeks, sometimes it takes years.
Although, payment networks are increasingly trying to move away from “static” payment, credit and debit card numbers. They prefer to use unique numbers for specific transactions. However, this transition may take a long time.
But companies are not idle. They work more and more intensively with our safety in mind. Last week, Mastercard competitor Visa Inc. also announced similar changes to the way cards work. Both companies aim to make the 16-digit credit or debit card number less and less important.
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