Are Bank Cards Living On Borrowed Time?

Payment apps also provide an extra layer of security by tokenising card data, meaning users' details are never exposed. Despite these benefits, and the drawbacks of physical cards - they are expensive to produce, even more expensive to distribute and the plastic they are made from poses a threat to the environment - South African banks are a long way from calling time on them.

"Some card acceptance mechanisms can't currently handle tokens, like ATMs, for example. Also, card point-of-sale machines in some countries still rely on really old technology. And most car rental companies need a physical card with ones name embossed on it to facilitate a transaction," said Lezanne Human, co-founder at Bank Zero .

Card numbers are important in other contexts, too, including for debit orders, at checkout when shopping online, or when paying for subscription services like Netflix. But a customer does not need to possess a physical card to have a card number, and most banking apps have some way of showing customers their card details on screen.

But even if the bank provides other ways to transact, customers also have reasons to keep using plastic cards, experts have said.

None of the banks TechCentral spoke to has committed to a timeline for deprecating plastic cards because there are external factors - like device and ATM support - that can limit the usability of tokenisation. All however, did say that eliminating plastic would contribute significantly to their ESG environmental, social, governance objectives.