The End Is Just A Beginning

Next month one of my credit cards expires. Except it doesn’t. As the bank issuing it has sent me a shiny new one well in advance, with the same number, a different CVC (card validation code – no I didn’t either) and an expiry date in five years’ time.

The same rigmarole occurs with all the three credit cards I hold, as well as the debit cards for my three bank accounts (personal, joint for household expenses and business). This fandango changes very little as my Goggle Pay automatically updates (I suspect Apple Pay does too), but occasionally I get a nagging message from some organisation I regularly pay saying my card has expired.

But why? I can see that when plastic cards first came out, there was a reason to renew them regularly as magnetic strips degraded. Yet these days, most of us just pay on our phone, or watch if you’re fancy, and if you use a card, you usually wave it at the card reader, so avoiding the damage that might be caused by physical card. Indeed, the only time one my cards is in contact with a machine is in the rare occasions I take cash out of an ATM (and I wonder why we don’t have smart ATMs that operate like card readers – but that another debate).

The problem is that banks are too stuck in their ways to change. To quote Grace Hopper, the pioneering computer scientist: “The most dangerous phrase in the language is ‘We’ve always done it this way’.”

So instead of making cards expire every five years, banks should only replace a card if:

1.       The technology has changed, so you need a better card;

2.       The card has stopped working and the customer needs a new one.

By doing this they can save time, energy, postage and frustration.

But someone from a bank can contact me and tell me why I’m wrong.