Hey everyone,
There are many credit card providers who are starting to send out credit/debit cards that don't have an actual number printed on or associated to the card. The card customer goes to the financial institutions app and can have a one time use credit card number generated. I believe this is how the new Apple Card is going to work.
How is everyone handling this...specifically for telephone sales that might be on a payment plan of some sort? How are you doing refunds? What issues have you experienced with these one time use credit card numbers?
Any and all discussions would be awesome.
- Chris
I can tell you that the Apple Card doesn't actually use one-time-use card numbers. There are separate numbers for each device enrolled in Apple Pay, and a separate number for the physical card (encoded on the magstripe and used with the EMV chip), and a separate number viewable in the Apple Wallet app for phone or online purchases (that don't support Apple Pay on the web). You can use the app to request that this last number be cancelled and reissued if you suspect it has been compromised, but it won't be cancelled routinely otherwise.
My understanding has always been that even if a number has been cancelled for new authorizations, it can always be refunded to since it is never disassociated with the cardholder's credit account. So refunds shouldn't be an issue. And given how much money the card companies make from vendors who use auto-billing, I would be extremely surprised if a major provider ever issued a card that did not offer a persistent reusable number. (At least as long as credit cards remain a mainstream payments solution.)
One follow-on thought -- perhaps one way a card issuer might deal with this would be to issue "one-time" use card numbers that allow for auto-billing by locking themselves to the first merchant that authorized against them? You could also look at this as a way for consumers to be more deliberate about how their credit cards are used -- knowing that if they are intending to hand over a card number to be used for auto-billing, they will need to use a card number that supports it. The old style of issuing just a single permanent number doesn't allow the consumer to specifically consent to auto-billing, which is obviously the root cause of the entire credit card fraud industrial complex.