Swipe no more: End of the magnetic security strip?

Could the end of the strip be the beginning of the end for the plastic card? /AP/Keith Strakocic

The magnetic strip on the back of a credit or payment card is ubiquitous, but for how much longer?

Mastercard, one of the world's largest credit card firms, said it will phase out the black lines on the back of its products.

The firm says it will stop them in 2024 and aims to cut the magnetic device out of its products completely by 2033, due to the popularity of cards with chips.

"The decline in payments powered by magnetic stripes [began] after chip-based payments took hold," Mastercard explained in a

blog

.

In the 1960s, American computing firm IBM decided magnetic tape was the safest way of attaching sensitive information to personal credit or debit cards.

According to the firm known as Big Blue

, its engineers struggled to attach the tape used to record information to a card, until one of their wives suggested melting the tape onto the card with the most futuristic of technologies... the humble clothes iron.

But payment tech has moved forward significantly in the past 60 years and chip technology boomed after a universal receiver was developed in the 1990s.

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According to EMVCo, which owns the EMV chip used in modern payment cards, nearly 90 percent of all global face-to-face transactions were made using its chip in 2020.

And since contactless payment and mobile device payment have emerged in the past decade, customers are now mostly confident in cards without the traditional magnetic band.

In the first quarter of 2021, a billion more Mastercard in-person contactless transactions were recorded than during the same period in 2020 and nearly half of all global payments were contactless in the second quarter, the company said.

And Mastercard isn't the only large company moving away from magnetic strips. New York City's Metro Transit Authority (MTA) recently

announced

the completion of its contactless network. While many public transport systems in Europe added contactless payment several years ago, the MTA stuck with the infamously flimsy MetroCard (with its magnetic strip) until now.

The yellow paper slip will be completely phased out by 2023.

So while it's not yet the final curtain for the magnetic strip, it won't be long until customers are told "this service terminates here."