The internet still asks for a card number

The internet was built on card numbers and has never really got over it.

You can hold a perfectly good balance, usable at every shop in your city, and still be unable to buy a software subscription, a plane ticket or a textbook, because the checkout wants sixteen digits and a date.

The gap

Mobile money is how people here pay each other. It is not how the internet takes payment. Those two sentences describe most of the frustration of being online in this region with money that works everywhere except where you need it.

A virtual card closes the gap. It is a card number issued against your own balance — no bank account, no credit check, no plastic.

It cannot go overdrawn

Each payment is authorised against the balance behind the card. There is nothing to spend beyond what is there.

The failure mode is a declined card, which is annoying for an afternoon. The alternative failure mode, on a credit product, is a debt, which is a different kind of problem entirely.

For most people, a card that can be declined is considerably safer than one that cannot.

Use more than one

This is the habit worth forming: a separate card for each subscription.

One card for your software. One for the streaming service. One for the site you are not sure about.

Then when something goes wrong — a leak, a merchant that makes cancelling impossible, a price rise nobody agreed to — you destroy that card. The problem ends immediately and nothing else you pay for is disturbed.

Compare that with a single bank card feeding fifteen subscriptions, where cancelling one thing means replacing the card and re-entering it in fourteen places.

Freeze from anywhere

Lost your phone? Freeze the card from any device you can sign in on.

There is no plastic to lose in the first place, which removes an entire category of risk that the physical version carries by design.

About the card details

Card data is handled so that BitriPay does not retain the sensitive values in a form that could be taken from it.

That is a deliberately precise sentence. The strongest security claim anyone can honestly make about stored card data is that they are not storing the part that matters — and any company telling you their stored card data is unbreakable is telling you something nobody can know.

What it costs

Issuance and usage are priced in the dashboard before you create a card, including any foreign-currency charge. You know what a purchase costs before you make it.

What you can check

These are facts about the running platform, not adjectives. Each one is visible in the product, in the API reference or in the ledger.

• Card details are handled so that BitriPay does not retain the sensitive values in a form that could be taken from it.
• A card is backed by your balance, so a card payment cannot exceed what is actually there.
• A card can be frozen or destroyed instantly, and destroying it does not touch the money behind it.
• A separate card per subscription confines a leak or a rogue merchant to that one card.

What it costs

Card issuance and usage are priced in the dashboard before you create one, including any foreign-currency charge, so the cost of a purchase is known before it is made.

Is it switched on?

Whether this is available depends on the authorisations in place and on what the administrator of a given deployment has switched on. That changes, and an article does not — so the live answer lives on the feature page, which reads it from the platform itself: Virtual cards on the features page.

Read next

• Wallets and transfers — Money that arrives the moment it leaves.
• Restricted wallets — Give money for a purpose, not just to a person.
• Adding money — Nothing appears until something arrived.