Bad news for German bank customers: Mastercard is abolishing Maestro

Maestro is the name of one of the two systems that allow your girocards to use them abroad and online. Mastercard wants to enforce its own card and is therefore switching off the system – soon.

The Maestro system from Mastercard and the V-Pay system from Visa provide local girocards and common bank cards with the most important additional features for use on the web and abroad. Without Maestro or V-Pay, bank cards would not be able to make payments in shops or withdraw cash from machines abroad.

And it is precisely this system that Mastercard will first abolish in mid-2023. From July 1, 2023, Girocards with the Maestro co-badge will no longer be allowed to be issued in most European countries. Cards that are already in circulation should remain valid until the end of the card period. That could well be a few more years. So if you have just received a new card, you can be satisfied.

Bank cards issued after July 1, 2023 will no longer allow their users to pay with the card while on vacation, for example. Other solutions such as a separate credit card are then required for this. With this step, Mastercard wants to push its own debit cards into the market, but is also reacting to a rapidly declining spread of Maestro cards. While the share was 602 million cards worldwide in 2016, it will be only 404 million in 2021.

However, nowhere will the effects of the decision have such clear consequences as in Germany. Most of the 100 million girocards in circulation have the Maestro or V-Pay co-badge. According to Finance scene a “significant double-digit million number” of cards could lose their online and international functionality.

With the Mastercard decision, German banks are coming under pressure to offer their customers a new solution. This could be a coupling with a debit mastercard, for example. The Savings Banks Association launched model projects last year. In Austria, this jump was made years ago in some cases.

Mastercard and Visa should give massive incentives to switch to their debit solutions. With neobanks such as N26 or the Solarisbank, they have already achieved the status of the standard card. This leaves the banks with only a few options. Either they bow to the pressure of the card giants or they actually invest billions in the European Payments Initiative (EPI), which has been bobbing for years, i.e. its own pan-European scheme to compete with Mastercard and Visa.

With the move by Mastercard and the forecast of the imminent successor to Visa, things will get going. Because with the termination, there is a need for action that cannot be suppressed. Let’s wait a while …