It’s time for virtual cards.
Here are the 7 primary reasons to use virtual debit cards.
Take the mental load off your mind and physical load off your wallet. Virtual cards as the name specify, exist only in digital form which means on your mobiles.
COVID pandemic has changed the spending habits to digital format faster than the world expected. Suddenly, there is an increase in every business creating their online presence and trying to reach you on your mobile. Similarly, a lot of individuals who averted to banking digitally for various reasons have realized the ease and importance of the feature and quickly adopted to digital banking.
With the finance industry continually evolving and innovating, there is an emergence of loads of features in recent times and one such feature is called ‘virtual debit cards’.
What actually is a virtual debit card?
It is nothing but a digital version of your physical debit card which is far more secure, faster and friendly. There is no forgetting the card as it stays with you in digital form everywhere.
It has the same 16 digit card format, an expiry and a CVV security code for making all types of purchases and payments. With the downside being you won’t be able to withdraw cash from ATMs and you can’t make purchases in chip and pin stores.
So, why a virtual card?
There are many answers to this question but let’s see the 7 primary reasons.
Safe and Secure payments
You must have read about card cloning at ATMs at some point in time. It’s everywhere in the news. There are devices attached to ATMs to steal data from your physical cards and make purchases leaving the accounts dry. This is the third most common form of e-commerce fraud. This can easily and effectively be countered by virtual cards because it simply would not be possible for the criminals to steal or copy a virtual card and create their own version.
Set a limit
Recently, there was news about a son spending lifetime savings of his parents on an online game. Apparently, he was given his mom’s debit card for making school supplies and it led to this. A virtual debit card is a clear use case for this example. You can create a virtual debit card, set spending limits to it and be done with it once the transaction is done. It’s that simple.
Save costs on international payments
The transaction fees for international payments are relatively high and pile up real quick if your business is involved in making global payments. Virtual cards can be a great solution to this as you will often be able to make payments in local currencies and get much lower transaction fee than you would expect from a traditional bank.
Lightning Fast
On a regular day, when you apply for a physical debit card the issuing company takes it’s time to verify your identity and ship the card which apparently takes at least a couple of days. With COVID now, the timelines have shot up even more. Throw a weekend in between and it goes up to a week’s time possibly.
In quite a contrast, virtual cards arrive right after your application is completed. You receive it on your email and usually be able to set it up in minutes ready to transact.
Quick Cancellation
Imagine you liked a concept so much so that you want to give it a shot but you don’t trust the site and don’t want to share your payment information to make that purchase. In scenarios like this, you can create an account, make a purchase and cancel the virtual card immediately with no hassle limiting the risk to just that one transaction. Best, isn’t it?
Multiple cards at a time
With a virtual debit card, you get an option to create multiple cards at once and issue them to your family members with their own spending limits or a team who makes purchases on your company card so that it is easy to track who is spending what and where. This is still a dream for many.
Go Green
You can do your bit to the environment by eliminating the physical card wastage and flaunt being tech-savvy and environment friendly at the same time. Do you know there are more than 20 billion payment cards in circulation? Millions expire each day and need to be replaced increasing the count on daily basis. All this can be reduced and eliminated with the adoption of virtual cards.
Want to give it a try?
There are many banks which provide virtual debit cards as on today like TransferWise, Revolut, PayGlobal and many more which shows the financial providers willingness to evolve and offer best solutions beyond traditional banking to ever-growing requirements of global citizens and businesses.
