Major change announced for Aussie credit card holders as banks look to stop cyberscams

AMP bank will issue numberless credit and debit cards to its customers next month, as part of a joint program with Mastercard in the battle against cybercrime impacting Australians.

In an Australian first for small business banking, the 16-digit card number will not appear anywhere on the debit card. The bank claims removing visible numbers will mean small businesses will be less susceptible to frauds and scams.

Instead, card details will be stored within the AMP banking app and will be accessible for single-use transactions.

AMP bank will rollout additional security features on its app, which will focus on multimodal biometric authentication.

Customers will be asked to use face ID and fingerprint ID to enter the app. They will also be prompted to record a video selfie when they first set up.

Digital tokens, which use a set of changing numbers to allow secure payment, will also be rolled out.

AMP Bank will use Mastercard to provide a payment system.

“(During COVID) we ended up with our card numbers stored in lots of different places and that’s become a target for cyber criminals and organised crime,” Mastercard executive Richard Wormald said on Sunrise on Wednesday.

“They are hacking into the retailers. They are stealing the numbers and it’s in the name of organised crime.

“This has become a billion-dollar problem we have to fix ... instead of getting out your card and putting in the same fixed number in all these websites, you go to your banking app, you can then spin up a single-use card that you as a consumer can then control.

“You might decide that you only want it to be used at that one retailer or only for the next month or only for a certain amount to come out of it.

“It puts the consumer back in control, but it also means if the number gets stolen it’s much less valuable for the hackers.

‘That’s the balance we’re trying to set here, is making sure it’s really convenient to shop online but we make life harder for organised crime to defraud Australians.”

Mastercard is looking to rollout the technology in 2030 to its own customers.

“If you look at your card today, it still has a mag stripe from the 1970s. It still has a chip for countries that don’t have contactless like here,” Wormald said.

“Many banks will add to the capability but still keep the card number for some time to allow consumers to adjust ...

“We operate in 220 countries. There are three billion Mastercards on the planet. You can use them at 150 million places.

“We want to make sure it’s convenient and safe and to try to get that balance right means we will be adding this rather than just taking things away.”

Numberless credit cards were rolled out in Europe in 2020.

Australians lost an estimated $2 billion to scams in 2021, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s annual Target Scams report.