Idea to solve the problem of changing card number on loads of subscriptions

I’m totally sold on Mondo at this point. So I’m going through my bank statement and finding things that aren’t Mondo top-ups, which is pretty much all online services that have my old card saved, and changing the card they have saved for me.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done this though. Every time a card expires, I have a bunch of services to tell about the new card details.

So I had this idea. Initially I thought it could be a product in itself but actually Mondo are probably in the best position to make it, or at least explain why it’s not possible.

The idea is a proxy card that handles the subscriptions, and then takes a payment from your actual card. This means that you’d only have to update your new card details in one place.

The only real problem I can think of for this is that expiry date of the proxy card. So the first question is there any way to create a debit/credit card with a longer than average expiry date?

My second question is: Is there any other legal reasons this isn’t possible? (Would you technically be committing fraud by paying with a card not owned by you…? Seems unlikely considering lots of people buy stuff with their employer’s company card all the time.)

My third question is: Would Mondo ever consider this? Obviously it’s quite removed from the products you currently have… But definitely fits into the mission as I understand it.

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Yes, great idea - I’ve also had this problem before.

A 16 digit card number (PAN) is actually just a pointer to an account. So you can have multiple PANs all pointing at the same account. You can even have PANs without a plastic card attached.

So the solution is to let you generate a virtual card just used for online subscriptions. I believe the expiry date can even be set to decades in future. You could even generate a new virtual card for every new subscription service - letting you can easily cancel a service by disabling the card.

It’s definitely something we’d like to support.

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I believe that there are a few existing services on the market that offer this functionality (MasterCard bought one of them a few years ago) - extending the thoughts, the existing services allow you not only to generate a virtual card, but also for you to specify the validity period yourself (useful perhaps when you don’t want a periodic subscription to carry on rolling over), a spend limit per virtual card (open ended or a particular value - useful if you want to make sure the company cannot take more than you budget for) and even limit the use by the number of transactions instead of the amount.

Using a different virtual card number per merchant is also extremely useful in the case when the merchant suffers a compromise - you can cancel the virtual card safe in the knowledge that the rest of your cards associated with your PAN will continue to work just fine. You can generate a new virtual card in milli-seconds and file that with the company to replace the compromised one - this is the same conceptual foundation that tokenisation works on - but that’s a whole another story.

It would be great if Mondo incorporated all of the above and more in the future :slightly_smiling:

That’s great to hear! You lot are solving all the problems!

I imagine it’s not very high up on your backlog, but definitely good to know that it’s both possible and something you’d like to do.

I’ve just fallen foul of something similar just now. My regular bank card has been lost, stopped and now waiting for new card. The trouble is though as the banks generate a new 16-digit new with each new card I now have several online/subscription payments failing as the old 16-digit number points to the stopped card and so payment is rejected