The transactions valid for State Cashback have exceeded half a billion, but what happens when the bank sends us a new card to replace the one already registered on IO?
The electronic payment instruments registered on the IO platform managed by PagoPa have exceeded 15 million, while over half a billion transactions have been processed since the start of the State Cashback program. On the other hand, users remain fairly stable: about 8.5 million. Some of them, in the last few days, are asking themselves a question: what happens if the bank replaces a card registered for Cashback?
The replacement of a card can occur mainly in two cases: the first is at the natural expiration of the card, with the bank sending a new card to the customer a few weeks before the expiration date; the second depends instead on any new agreements made by the bank with the payment circuits, which lead the bank to replace the cards already issued with new ones free of charge. In both cases, users, in a sense, leave the old way for the new and wonder what happens to transactions already made with the expiring card and what they need to do to maintain Cashback membership after receiving the new card.
New card from the bank: what happens to Cashback
Unfortunately, even if the bank changes our debit, credit or ATM card (on its own initiative or because we chose a more advanced card), the customer does not lose a single penny of accumulated cashback, nor does it change the number of transactions already made.
Simply, upon activation of the new card, the old one stops working both for payments and (consequently) for the Cashback program. Even if some transactions made with the old card have not yet been counted in the IO app, nothing happens: even if the card is now deactivated, in fact, if the transition is valid it will be counted.
New card from the bank: it must be registered on IO
The thing that users of State Cashback must be careful of, however, is that the new card issued by the bank is not automatically registered to the Cashback program, even if it is the "heir" of the previous one. On the contrary, the new card must be entered manually in the Wallet section of IO with the classic procedure already seen in the past.
The user must also pay attention to one detail: the new card may use a different payment circuit from the one used by the previous card, so it will be shown in the IO app with a different logo. However, it will be easy to recognize it by reading the last card numbers.
Should the old card be deleted from IO?
Theoretically, once you switch from the old to the new card and after registering the new one on IO, you could also decide to remove the old one from the payment methods registered on IO in order to have a "cleaner" and easier to read Wallet section.
Those who decide to do so do not risk anything: no transactions will be deleted together with the old card. However, it's not advisable to do this for a very simple reason: by leaving in the Wallet section all the cards used to make payments accounted for Cashback purposes, it's much easier to track the payments (which are linked to the individual card) and, should it be necessary, find out if there has been any unaccounted transaction.