The Latest Credit Card Innovation: Disposable Numbers

There’s one major topic driving the conversations in payments: fraud.

More specifically, credit card fraud. And that’s why one company is after innovating the market by putting its own twist on how credit card numbers are thought of by making them disposable.

This is part of the tech by a startup called Final, which this week started shipping its Visa-branded consumer credit card product with that feature. What’s more than just disposable credit card numbers is that those card numbers only apply to a single transaction and a single merchant.

“It’s been two years in the making, and we are thrilled to start welcoming our earliest customers this week,” Final’s CEO Aaron Frank told TechCrunch. “We chose to do the hard thing: build a consumer brand and behind it, a full-stack issuing company, from scratch.”

Here’s a little more about how it works, according to the company’s site. What the technology does, Final says, is “generate virtual cards that are locked to a single merchant, and can’t be used anywhere else. Use one-time use cards when needed, and create recurring cards for things like monthly subscriptions and all your card-on-file relationships.”

The card gives the consumer the option to use the iOS app if the shopper doesn’t feel the site is trusted. From there, the app generates a new credit card number and once that specific transaction is complete, the number becomes invalid for future purchases. The company also offered merchant-locked cards that can only be used for a certain site so they user can tailor their cards to their shopping needs.

According to reports, supply is high so there is a waiting list for consumers.