UK-based fintech Revolut’s newest product is a “disposable” virtual card, a product that was designed with fraud protection in mind, the fintech announced today. The card, which sits inside Revolut’s mobile app, wipes a user’s details and resets them after every payment.
The startup, which has applied for a European banking license, currently has about one million users, as of November 2017.
This new feature is made to combat online fraud, where fraudsters can scrape a user’s credit information after it’s been typed into an online form for purchases. By wiping the user’s details and then presenting new ones for every new payment, Revolut seeks to make that tactic useless for potential fraudsters.
The feature will work with the existing feature in Revolut’s mobile app, including the ability to freeze and unfreeze the physical payment cards customers have loaded into the app.
Vlad Yatsenko, co-founder and chief technology officer for Revolut, said of the feature in a statement:
Instead of matching what the larger institutions are doing, we are changing the game entirely by introducing disposable virtual cards and promoting existing features such as location-based security and the ability to freeze/unfreeze cards.
It will take approximately 800 years before we begin to run out of 16-digit card numbers, so we view disposable virtual cards as a sustainable, long-term solution to tackling online card fraud.