Virtual and single-use cards, now on every plan

Your physical card does a lot of travelling. It sits in your wallet, it gets tapped in shops, and its number is saved in dozens of online accounts, some of which you used once in 2022. Every one of those is a place it can leak from. When it does, you cancel the card, wait for a new one in the post, and spend an afternoon updating every subscription that used it.

Virtual and single-use cards fix most of that. Until now they were only on Premium and Metal. From today, every Pocket plan includes them, Standard included.

Three kinds of card

All three draw on the same Pocket balance and spend in any of the 38 currencies you hold, at the mid-market rate when a conversion is needed. The difference is how long the card number lives and where you use it.

Virtual cards appear in the app the moment you create them, with their own number, expiry date and security code. You can add them to Apple Pay or Google Pay and use them in shops too.

Virtual cards: one per job

The habit we suggest is one virtual card per job. Use one for streaming and software subscriptions, another for the online shops you use every week, and maybe a third for a trial you are not sure about. Give each a name and a colour so you can tell them apart in your transactions.

Because each card is separate, you can control it separately:

• Freeze it with one tap, and unfreeze it just as fast. A frozen card declines every payment, including subscriptions.

• Set a monthly limit. A €20 limit on your subscriptions card means a surprise price rise gets declined instead of paid.

• Lock it to one merchant. The first business to charge the card becomes the only one that can. If the number leaks, it is useless anywhere else.

• Delete it when you are done. Anything still trying to charge it will fail, and you will see the attempt in the app.

If one card's number does leak, you replace that one card in seconds. Your physical card, and everything else, carries on as before.

Single-use cards: gone after one payment

A single-use card works once. As soon as a payment is approved, Pocket destroys the number and generates a fresh one in its place, ready for the next purchase. If the site you bought from is breached a year later, the number it stored is worthless.

They are made for the moments you hesitate before typing in your card details: a shop you found through an advert, a parking app in a city you are visiting, a ticket from a site you have never heard of. They also suit free trials that ask for a card up front. The trial starts, the card disappears, and the paid plan that follows has nothing to charge.

We built single-use cards for the shops people were nervous about. In testing, they ended up using them for almost everything they bought only once.

Tomás Reis, product designer on the cards team

There is one place they do not fit: anything that charges you later. Hotels, car hire and some airlines take a deposit, then the final amount days afterwards. Use a virtual card for those, so the second charge has somewhere to go.

How they stay safe

Virtual and single-use card numbers are never shown in full until you unlock the app with your face, fingerprint or passcode. Every payment, on every card, goes through the same real-time fraud checks as your physical card, and you get a notification within a second or two. If something looks wrong, you can freeze the card from the notification itself.

Pocket AI keeps an eye on them as well. Ask it "which of my virtual cards are still being charged?" and it lists each card with the merchants using it and what they cost you a month.

Getting started

Open the Cards tab and tap the plus button. Choose virtual or single-use, give it a name, and it is ready to use. If you want to compare what each plan includes, from Standard through to Metal with its 1% cashback, the cards page has the full list.