Death of the credit card number: five big changes coming to the way we pay

Saturday, 6 June 2026

Prompted by $265 million in recent New Zealand fraud losses, major payment networks are prioritizing consumer security.

Mastercard is phasing out physical card numbers and introducing single-use virtual tokens to stop online scammers.

Upcoming innovations include dynamic routing for multi-account cards, real-time tracking, and AI tools for small businesses.

Analysis: If you want a glimpse at how our relationship with commerce is set to evolve, then it pays to look at what the major credit card companies are doing.

Between them, Mastercard and Visa control roughly 90% of the entire global payment network market beyond China (where China UnionPay is the dominant player).

These two companies process an estimated $26 trillion through their networks every year, as consumers swipe, insert and hover their cards over payment terminals, while others shop online.

The innovations these companies release are imperative because they influence not only how we pay, but also how safe our money is when those payments are made.

A big reason these companies have become so dominant on a global scale is because we trust them to keep our money safe when we punch our numbers into a machine and send a payment to the far reaches of the world.

But that trust is increasingly under threat.

Comprehensive data from Payments NZ in late 2025 showed that Kiwis lost a gross total of $265 million to fraud in the space of one year.

“Of the $265 million defrauded, about $126 million of reported scams involved authorised payments, where individuals were tricked into approving the transaction themselves,” said Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) spokesperson Ian Caplin.

“The remaining $139 million came from unauthorised transactions, where scammers accessed accounts without the account holder’s knowledge.”

The efficiency with which we can pay for things today is also the principal tool used by scammers to get their grubby hands on our hard-earned cash.

The big credit card companies exist at this intersection, where efficiency is incredibly important (just think of how much a few seconds matter when buying a Taylor Swift ticket) but also presents the biggest threat to the trust consumers have in them.

Looking at Mastercard’s recent roadmap of planned innovations, it’s quite evident that the company wants to make it far harder for scammers to get hold of your credit card.

Card numbers condemned to history

The days of card numbers appearing on the physical card are numbered. Megan Simons, the Mastercard country manager for New Zealand, says that this will make it more difficult for criminals to use lost and stolen cards.

“The card number still exists, but it’s off the front of the card,” says Simons.

“It’s essentially useless for anyone to go shopping online because the number’s not there.”

This innovation is already being rolled out in New Zealand, with organisations like Sharesies, SquareOne and Emerge all featuring numberless credit cards.

It’s only a matter of time before the major banks follow this trend.

You can’t have my credit card number

This is another interesting security feature that’s coming our way. With online shopping proliferating, it can be difficult to know whether you should trust an online store with your credit card details.

To counter this, Mastercard will introduce single-use virtual cards, which will enable a user to generate a temporary token that can be used to make a purchase. Once the purchase is made, that card disappears.

“Instead of putting in your static card number, you could go into your banking app, and you could generate a single-use virtual card,” says Simons, explaining that it means you won’t have to cancel your entire card if you make one erroneous purchase.

It essentially allows you to test the water without compromising your entire credit card.

One card to control everything

Many New Zealanders today have one banking app, but numerous cards all dedicated to different accounts. Each of those physical cards can be viewed as a vulnerability that scammers could target.

Mastercard is looking to simplify this through a process called dynamic routing, which enables the user to pre-program which account they want to use with the same card.

These payment preferences can be punched directly into the banking app ahead of time, based on parameters the user has set.

Simons explains that you could ask your app to put any purchases over a certain price into credit, whereas anything smaller comes off your cash account. It could also be determined by certain stores or categories of shopping.

This innovation will simplify the physical wallet, while also giving us just a little more security.

Pending woes

We’ve all seen the little ‘payment pending’ icon pop up once we’ve made a purchase. They tend to leave you in limbo, uncertain if the transaction has gone through. At times, they can also cause confusion in terms of making it seem like the wrong transaction has gone through.

To understand this, you have to look under the hood of what actually happens when you make a purchase. The frictionless tap at the register is only an authorisation, after which the network checks if you actually have the funds necessary to make the purchase. The actual movement of money between your bank and the retailer’s bank only happens in the background later. As things currently stand, it could take hours or even days before you shift from pending to official purchase.

Simons says updates being made now will enable real-time movement of money, which, when implemented at scale, will negate the need for the pending icon.

This, says Simons, will be great for consumers, but it will also mean businesses have a better understanding of their cash flow at any given moment.

Small businesses to embrace AI

Stuff has already reported on how agentic AI (the process of getting AI to shop on our behalf) will make it easier than ever before to spend money, but there are also changes coming for New Zealand’s approximately 600,000 small to medium-sized businesses.

Simons says business owners will soon get their hands on a number of AI tools capable of handling all the complex back-office admin, including inventory control, cash flow management and even event planning.

Simons says a big part of the agentic AI picture will be business-to-business purchases. She presents a scenario where a business owner might instruct AI to purchase supplies or book a venue run by another organisation.

This will serve an incredibly useful purpose to smaller businesses, who don’t have extensive procurement, accounting or HR teams to assist with these tasks.

So what changes would you like to see in the way we pay for things? What are some of the most sophisticated scams you’ve seen? And do you think these innovations will keep you safer? Let us know in the comments section below.