Contactless payments have become frequent and increasingly familiar in Italy too, also thanks to the pandemic which has made the exchange of cash in favor of credit/debit cards and applications less attractive. For Mastercard it is also a matter of security, the evolution of payments is thus leading to the disappearance of the dear old magnetic strips, now little used in our parts but inexplicably widespread in other countries such as the United States.
It doesn't matter, contactless and chips are the future and the financial giant has thus decided to dictate a roadmap that will retire magnetic strips all over the world starting from 2024. We will start from Europe, which is already ahead in this transition, and then continue in the United States, where the transition will begin in 2027 and end in 2029, when the new credit / debit cards will no longer have this function. To get rid of them completely, we will have to wait for the latest releases to expire, Mastercard therefore predicts that from 2033 there will no longer be cards with magnetic strips in circulation.
Seventy years of honorable service and space for chip and contactless, the latter have literally exploded in recent times and Mastercard speaks of 1 billion more similar transactions made in the first quarter of 2021. When it comes to payments in person the contactless is becoming more prevalent and already in use around the world 45% of the time, at least according to their data for the second quarter of the year.