Online Virtual Cards

[alexs (Alex Sherwood)]

Here’s some more detail on the use case for virtual cards, from a Monzo Security and Fraud engineer -

@daniel

It could, potentially, be better to allow the user to generate full one time PANs (primary account numbers i.e. the 16 digit card number) from within the app. One of the things I find quite frustrating about fraud is the lack of visibility we have (as a bank) into what facilitated certain instances of fraud. For example, we know that a criminal somehow got a copy of someone’s card details and did an online payment but we have no visibility into how they did that, did they skim the contactless? Did they breach the database of an online retailer? Did they have an ATM skimmer? Did they just guess the details? If we can use different PANs for different things then we get more visibility into how the criminals are getting the card details and know where to focus efforts.

It’s always interesting to hear how adding these features can help Monzo prevent fraud, which ultimately benefits users too