CREDIT CARDS GO VERTICAL, DITCHING CLASSIC LOOK AND MAGNETIC STRIP

By Chandrayee Roy Choudhury, Canada: 

From the old way of carbon copying an account number and having a customer sign off on a purchase through to the advent of magnetic stripes and the chip-and-pin systems of today, the act of using a credit card hasn't changed much over the last 50-odd years, even as the technology under the hood has.

The most obvious shift afoot today turns the familiar wallet-shaped horizontal credit card on its side and adopts a new vertical configuration that's faster and easier to use.

The vast majority of credit card transactions today happen either online, where no physical card is involved, or using chip-and-pin technology, or tap-to-pay contactless systems. But those transactions are still happening on infrastructure built for the previous generation of swipers, so the industry is upgrading itself to keep up with consumer tastes while beefing up security behind the scenes.



"A portrait orientation  easier to tap," MasterCard Canada's vice-president of digital products Suhkmani Dev told in an interview. "From a user's standpoint, it's good design for many reasons."

Unlike swipe cards, tap-enabled cards are backed by a technology that Dev calls "tokenization" because the identifying information being exchanged in a transaction is unique for just that one transaction, making it much harder for a fraudster to intercept any data that would allow them to compromise an account and use it again and again.