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Japan facing credit card number shortage

mainichi.jp

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Re: Japan facing credit card number shortage

#31

Post by hinkley »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #10
chrischen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cards can have nfc, and most people already have nfc readers in the form of phones. I think this is the easiest way to support cryptographic payments.

I’m honestly surprised the move to contactless hasn’t occurred faster, as the costs for hardware seem lower for nfc versus chip.

For consumer commerce, between the contactless and the smart chips this should be solved.

Someone else said the number is 'hidden' from the users but it's not hiding versus not hiding that's the problem. It's that for e-commerce the human has to transcribe the number by hand. You can't hide it, except via another system.

Re: Japan facing credit card number shortage

#32

Post by yongjik »

viraptor wrote: post #15

Something not clear from the article: The tech already supports longer numbers. Diners, Discover, UnionPay cards already allow up to 19 digits officially. The problem could be in the custom forms which think 4x4 is the right format, but the back-end should "just work" with them. What I really don't understand is why the article makes it seem like a national problem given the prefix is assigned to the companies, rathe…

If twenty years of fighting banking websites has taught me anything, I'd never assume that the backend would "just work". In fact, if any bank decides to roll out a longer number scheme, I'd probably want to make sure that I wouldn't need their service for a few coming days, just to be safe.

Re: Japan facing credit card number shortage

#33

Post by viraptor »

yongjik wrote: post #32
viraptor wrote: post #15

Something not clear from the article: The tech already supports longer numbers. Diners, Discover, UnionPay cards already allow up to 19 digits officially. The problem could be in the custom forms which think 4x4 is the right format, but the back-end should "just work" with them. What I really don't understand is why the article makes it seem like a national problem given the prefix is assigned to the companies, rathe…

If twenty years of fighting banking websites has taught me anything, I'd never assume that the backend would "just work". In fact, if any bank decides to roll out a longer number scheme, I'd probably want to make sure that I wouldn't need their service for a few coming days, just to be safe.

Banking websites are not the backend. Backend here is what the card issuers do / how the payments are routed. The level of scrutiny between those is very different.

Re: Japan facing credit card number shortage

#34

Post by ghayes »

michannne wrote: post #24
jandrese wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The identifier is hidden from the user so if it's huge and complex that is no problem. My point is that we're talking about putting a lot of effort into overhauling the system to support a scheme that is arguably already obsolete. If we're putting in the effort we should just remove the old insecure digits entirely and focus on a cleaner modern solution.

The problem with that is the purpose of a credit card system is convenience, especially the convenience involved in being able to represent the identifier in an easily compact manner. When it's a few groups of digits, I can print it onto a card or piece of paper, and just plug the digits in whenever I need to validate the number and run a transaction. You can't do that with a token. What happens when I want to use my…

Many of those use cases probably shouldn’t be supported. It would cut down on fraud if we disallowed card not present transactions on unknown devices.

Re: Japan facing credit card number shortage

#35

Post by [deleted] »

donor20 wrote: post #30

This is a ridiculous story. Japan has a population of 150M. If you can't give folks a number from SIXTEEN digits - something is wrong with the folks giving out the numbers. Some answers to the excuses. The 6 digits at front, if a company legit runs out of numbers, ask for another prefix. The reality. Instead of using the numbers properly (random ID to tie to a user account) they are probably putting some kind of stru…

[deleted]

Re: Japan facing credit card number shortage

#36

Post by azernik »

henearkr wrote: post #20
pcurve wrote: post #14

SUrely, there's some inefficiency in how numbers are used... 10 quadrillion for 7.5 billion people isn't enough?

The first digits are a header identifying the type of the card, (visa, mastercard...) and probably other characteristics. The main problem is that in Japan everybody has like 5 credit cards, because every big company has its own financial branch and issues cards (maybe to profit from a "reservoir" effect of the accounts?). So you have a credit card linked to your clothes shop, one from your supermarket, one from Raku…

The US also has this, but lower adoption rates of NFC wallets mean it's a pain for consumers to take full advantage of the system at a Japanese scale.

Re: Japan facing credit card number shortage

#37

Post by [deleted] »

donor20 wrote: post #30

This is a ridiculous story. Japan has a population of 150M. If you can't give folks a number from SIXTEEN digits - something is wrong with the folks giving out the numbers. Some answers to the excuses. The 6 digits at front, if a company legit runs out of numbers, ask for another prefix. The reality. Instead of using the numbers properly (random ID to tie to a user account) they are probably putting some kind of stru…

[deleted]

Re: Japan facing credit card number shortage

#38

Post by snuxoll »

viraptor wrote: post #15

Something not clear from the article: The tech already supports longer numbers. Diners, Discover, UnionPay cards already allow up to 19 digits officially. The problem could be in the custom forms which think 4x4 is the right format, but the back-end should "just work" with them. What I really don't understand is why the article makes it seem like a national problem given the prefix is assigned to the companies, rathe…

I’ve run into multiple issues already with poorly designed forms on sites that claim to accept Amex that freak out when I enter my 15-digit card number, I would love to see the mess that adding longer numbers would cause.

Re: Japan facing credit card number shortage

#40

Post by x87678r »

donor20 wrote: post #30

This is a ridiculous story. Japan has a population of 150M. If you can't give folks a number from SIXTEEN digits - something is wrong with the folks giving out the numbers. Some answers to the excuses. The 6 digits at front, if a company legit runs out of numbers, ask for another prefix. The reality. Instead of using the numbers properly (random ID to tie to a user account) they are probably putting some kind of stru…

The sixteen digits are shared globally. Japan would only get a fraction, the size I'm not sure.
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