You Must Change Your Debit & Credit Cards By December 31; Here's Why

Banks across India have been sending message to all account holders, requesting them to upgrade their debit and credit cards. However, as usual people have been ignoring them as spam. You too might have looked over it. Look again!

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has asked banks to request account holders to replace their cards. According to a report in India Today, the old debit and credit cards will become useless after December 31.

Debit and credit card privacy has been a crucial issue, with multiple cases of online bank fraud. In order to protect people and their hard-earned money, the RBI has issued this directive. it has prescribed new chip-based cards to keep the money and transactions safe.

The existing cards are magnetic stripe-only cards. Cloning of these cards has become a major challenge to those responsible for handling safe monetary transactions. The new EMV chip-based cards are deemed to be a solution to this challenge.

Replacement of existing debit and credit cards with the new EMV chip-based ones will be free of cost. The RBI directive is applicable to all international debit and credit cards too. The new chip-based cards are more secure, with higher standards of data encryption and storage technology. All customer-related information is stored in a dynamic format, which makes it difficult to clone these cards.

As per the guidelines, the existing magnetic stripe-only cards will not be valid beyond December 31. We suggest you replace them if you haven't already.