My short answer: Plastic may recede in some places, but the payment infrastructure behind the card keeps working. To answer the question of “the end of cards,” you have to think about the plastic, the payment credential and the payment network separately.
Imagine paying for a coffee by holding your phone near a terminal. A confirmation appears, you take your drink and leave. Your plastic card never comes out of your wallet; yet the payment may still have run on the account and card infrastructure behind that card.
That small detail sits at the center of the debate: Using a physical object less does not mean the financial product behind it has disappeared.
- 01PlasticThe object we carry in a wallet.
- 02Payment credentialThe card number, or the token that replaces it.
- 03Payment networkThe infrastructure that carries the transaction.
What actually moves onto the phone?
It is easy to think of a card as the object we carry. But a payment also involves the account behind the card, the institution that authorizes the transaction and the systems that let the merchant accept it. When the interface changes, those roles do not all have to change at once.
The payment tokenisation framework of EMVCo, the body that manages the EMV specifications, is a technical example. Instead of the real card number, a payment can use an alternative value, a token, whose use is restricted to a particular device, merchant or payment scenario. A token here is not a cryptocurrency; it is a way of representing payment information. As that representation changes, the card issuer and the payment network keep their roles.
The visible innovation is tapping a phone. The more important question for products and infrastructure is where, and within which limits, payment authority can be used.
What does the 2030 ambition actually cover?
On 11 June 2024, Mastercard announced a goal of 100% e-commerce tokenisation in Europe by 2030, with a focus on phasing out manual card entry. That is a company ambition, not a completed transition or a timetable for withdrawing physical cards. The announcement says nothing about physical cards.
The distinction matters. Not typing a card number online, not carrying a card in a shop and not using a card network are three different changes. Progress on one does not mean the other two have happened.
Consider an online checkout where you pick a saved payment method in one step. The journey gets shorter, but authorization, fees and after-sales support can still depend on several organizations. Fewer screens for the customer do not mean an equally simpler system behind them.
Habits don’t change on a single date
The European Central Bank’s SPACE 2024 study of the euro area found that the share of payments made with mobile apps is rising, while cash is still the most frequently used method at physical points of sale by number of transactions. These are euro-area figures for 2024; they should not be read as a picture of Turkey or of 2026.
The conclusion I draw: Payment habits can change by layering new options on top of old ones rather than replacing them.
As a design scenario, imagine someone who usually pays with a phone, carries a backup card when travelling and occasionally needs another method. This is not a measured customer profile; it shows what a product designed for a single channel can miss. What happens when a phone is replaced, access to the device is lost or the preferred method is not accepted matters as much as the moment a payment succeeds.
Where will the bank’s brand appear?
The front of a card has been a visible place for a bank’s brand in the customer’s hand. When payment starts on a phone screen, attention may shift to the wallet’s design and the default payment method. This is a competition scenario I am putting forward, not a finding that customers have changed their bank preferences.
In that scenario, the bank’s product question widens: Beyond the card’s design, adding a card to a wallet, transaction notifications, freezing a card, disputes and support all become part of the brand relationship. Customers may see the bank’s logo less at the moment of payment, but they will expect a clear and fast answer from the bank when something goes wrong. As visibility falls, service quality may matter more.
My forecast
There is no reliable, universal date on which physical cards will disappear. A more useful approach is to track three developments separately: how people prefer to start a payment, how far tokenisation reaches and how well alternatives work when something fails.
From here on, this is a forecast. I think plastic will recede in some settings while card infrastructure keeps working less visibly; elsewhere, other payment infrastructures may gain ground. The pace will depend on the country, the product and the customer’s needs.
If we measure the end of the card only by the space it takes in a wallet, we may miss the bigger change: A payment instrument may become less something we hold and more a permission whose conditions we manage. What I wrote about agents in the first issue applies here too: Control is part of the product.
Sources
- EMVCo — EMV Payment Tokenisation ↗
- Mastercard — 100% e-commerce tokenization by 2030 in Europe ↗11 Jun 2024
- European Central Bank — SPACE 2024 ↗Dec 2024
Sources checked on 30 October 2026.