Bank card with an extended validity period: are there any problems?

“Your card is expiring, but you can continue to use it, you do not need to reissue the card.” Many expiring debit and credit card holders receive such messages. Will there be any problems using such a bank card? Or is it better to re-release it? Igor Pan, a specialist in digital assets of the Finmir marketplace, told Moskovskaya Pravda about this.

Recently, quite often one can hear fears that after the expiration of a bank card of Visa and Mastercard payment systems, they will cease to operate in Russia. We are talking about cards that were supposed to be reissued after March 9, 2022, when two global players in the payment market stopped cooperating with Russian banks and making their payments. But domestic credit organizations, thanks to the NCC organization created in advance, were able to accumulate all the processes of making payments within the country without resorting to foreign services. As a result, all physical payments with any Russian bank cards and payments in Russian online stores should go through without flaws. Separately, we make a reservation that Russian Visa and Mastercard cards are not accepted in foreign offline and online stores, since there is no way to get confirmation of the availability of funds on an account in Russia.

But here it is worth mentioning two problems that Russians can still encounter when paying with “expired” bank cards.

So, some banks did not have time to reconfigure the equipment and add new parameters to their software. Sometimes this led to failures in payment at cash terminals or when working with ATMs. But this flaw is quickly corrected by full-time programmers who replace parameters inside the code.

The second problem could be errors when making payments in online stores or other services. Especially for those companies that use the services of outsourced developers. To fix the problem, it is required that the condition be immediately written in the program code that the validity of the card will be later than the current date. If not, then the store may refuse to serve the client without even sending a request to the bank. But programmers should already be aware of banks’ decisions to extend the validity of Russian cards and make adjustments to their software.

All these situations are extremely rare, one might even say singly, but they arose among Russians (especially in the first decade of the current year). Therefore, there were such rumors that we urgently need to run and reissue cards. Let’s hurry to dispel them – there is no need for this. If a situation arises that the card is not accepted for payment, you should immediately contact the bank or online store and clarify with them the relevance of the card you have.

It is worth mentioning that cardholders of the Mir payment system should not have problems with making payments.

The card of this payment system can also be taken on a trip abroad to those countries with which there are agreements on their acceptance in stores and ATMs. Although you need to be prepared that the Russian card may not be read abroad. So cash won’t hurt either.

By the way

Sberbank explained that when paying online with a card with an extended validity period, it should be taken into account that the CVV/CVC code and validity period on the plastic card and on its image in the mobile application may differ. When entering card data, you can use both options, but if you cannot enter the old data, you need to use the card details from the mobile application.

Alena Bodrienko.