Bank axes credit card over chip and PIN cost

Online bank Intelligent Finance (IF) is closing down a credit card used by 70,000 customers because it is too expensive to upgrade the infrastructure to cope with chip and PIN.

Customers using the offset credit card will have four weeks to move to another IF card or repay the balance.

An IF spokeswoman said that only around 10 per cent of the customers are using the offset functions in the card anyway.

Because the offset card used a separate system to the bank's Visa and other cards, she said, the costs of making it chip and PIN compliant are just too high.

"It was going to cost a lot to do the conversion [on] the IT platform," she told silicon.com.

"It just wasn't going to be worth the cost. It just wasn't worth doing it when there weren't that many cards in circulation."

More than 100 million chip and PIN cards have been issued in the UK to 38 million cardholders since March 2003. More than 70 PIN-verified transactions take place every second.