Another bank has chosen to switch over to Mastercard with NatWest switching its debit cards to Mastercard.
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Another nail in the coffin for visa
Apart from Barclays, Nationwide and Jaja are visa even in the UK credit card game anymore?
Guessing it’s the higher interchange outside the UK thats tipping it.
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They also do credit cards for Co-operative Bank (and their Smile brand). I think some HSBC credit cards are still Visa too, but most are Mastercard - they have a mix of card types.
But you are right that it’s been difficult to find Visa credit cards for a while, most seem to be Mastercard (a reversal of the situation with debit cards until recently).
Visa are in trouble if lots of banks ditch them for debit too, as it would shrink their UK customer base (which must make them a significant amount of money, and is an attractive market given that we tend to use cards a lot here).
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I wouldn’t say a company with an 83% market share in the UK is in need of a coffin.
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This caught my eye:
Mastercard and NatWest Group today announced an expansion of their payments partnership by agreeing to convert all the Banking Group’s retail and business debit cards to Mastercard. The agreement includes all NatWest Group brands: NatWest, Royal Bank of Scotland, Ulster Bank and Coutts, totalling 16 million cards.
I wonder if that totals, more or less, the number of active accounts? I thought it would be more.
Edit: this link has some old stats of RBS Group (as was) having 18% of the market. If you assume 60m accounts then 18% of that is 10.8m. That would mean 5m or so joint or multiple accounts, which feels reasonable.
Interestingly, that does mean that, with those super rough, numbers then Monzo probably has around half the numbers of actual customers than NatWest Group. 
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Some accounts may not have a card, but others will have two (like joint accounts or a carer’s card).
So it may even out to about the number of current accounts but there are probably slightly more cards than there are customer accounts.
Some customers may have multiple accounts too, so even then you can’t take the figure and say that it matches the number of customers.
It only really gives an idea of just how many cards the group has in circulation (clearly a lot)!
Edit: I’ve just seen your edit @Peter_G. Very interesting figures! That does show that Monzo is starting to get to a really very significant size.
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Of course, this is NatWest switching back to Mastercard debit cards. They were run through the Maestro scheme before they became Visa.
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So Revolut does both MasterCard and Visa, and currently pushing a lot of Visa in UK and Europe. (Not credit card).
Tymit is Visa too.
And there is Vanquis supposedly too (according to a price comparison website).
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It seems from social media posts that the switchover has started with new customers getting Mastercard, as well as those who report their card lost, missing, or stolen.
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Revoluts free standard is now also Mastercard. It was Visa a few days ago. I think Visa is dying
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Revolut actively pits visa against MasterCard in various locations based on incentives that each of them offer back to revolut.
Hence you see flip flopping and % ratio split, to maintain whatever target they agreed.
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Are they the new designs too?
Should be, the switch to Mastercard is the reason for the change I believe. Hopefully the social media teams are actually correct about them getting issued now.
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