Is this the end for the magnetic stripe?

Are there any benefits to keeping magstripe cards or tokens around?

“No,” says Sue Walnut, product director for intelligent transportation systems at Vix Technology, bluntly.

She argues there are now so many different ways of validating a rail ticket – for example, QR codes presented on phone screens, tickets printed at home, prepaid contactless cards – that there is less need to retain magstripe technology than ever before.

But magstripe tickets and entry cards do slot conveniently into credit card holders in wallets and purses. The new paper tickets being trialled by Northern and other rail firms are larger. “They are a bit unwieldy and cumbersome,” says Ms Walnut.

Magstripe has hung around for so long partly because it is relatively cheap and the specifications for reading machines were put in place many decades ago, says Stephen Cranfield at Barnes International, which makes equipment for magnetic stripe testing.

“If you took your card today and used it in a magstripe reader from 1970, it would still be able to read it,” he says.

His firm has worked on a variety of systems – including one designed to allow kidney failure patients to use a magstripe card for setting up their dialysis machine.

Despite the ubiquity of dark brown or black magstripes, they can actually come in a whole range of colours. “It’s quite popular in China, actually – gold stripes,” explains Mr Cranfield.

But now that US banks are finally switching to chip and PIN cards, the market for magstripe is clearly dwindling.

Prof Murdoch says although magstripe technology is extremely well established, it is “inevitable” that it will gradually disappear. One downside to that, he suggests, is that magnetic stripe failures and fraud are currently well understood. Newer technologies, while in theory more secure, may also be more complex – and therefore exploitable by criminals using novel methods.

Sometimes, members of the public contact Prof Murdoch when they are having trouble proving to their bank that they have been the victim of fraud.

“If the transaction was done by magstripe, then it’s a very easy argument to say someone copied it,” says Prof Murdoch as he points out the irony. “But if the transaction was one of the more secure methods – then it’s much harder.”