Steward Bank has been on an overdrive to replace its Magstripe cards with chip cards and it seems they are almost done with the exercise. The bank has been regularly sending out a warning message to its account holders informing them that all Magstripe cards will stop working at the end of this month.
Your ZWL Magstripe card will be phased out effective 30/04/2021. Visit any branch or WhatsApp 07721911191 to have a new Chip and PIN card delivered to you.
The contents of the SMS send by Steward Bank
Telling people to go and have their cards replaced on a wholesale scale is probably just as hard as trying to convince people to go and get vaccinated. A lot of people will keep putting it off until they are presented with some sort of ultimatum even though the whole exercise is for their own benefit. Such is the power of prevarication.
The insistent SMSes from Steward are probably a deliberate attempt to light a fire under the holdouts. A lot of people especially the elderly and those in remote areas would probably have been reluctant to go through the hustle of changing their cards from the magnetic one to a Chip card when the card they have is working. By deactivating the old cards or at least announcing they will do so, Steward is hoping most people who haven’t made yet the switch will do so with a little bit of urgency.
This will benefit you as a Steward Account holders
Cloning a Magistripe card is very trivial indeed as the cards use very old technology. The technology to clone cards is easy to obtain, cheap and quite easy to use. Card cloners continue to wreak havoc in Zimbabwe to this day. A lot of people have lost their entire salaries and some pensions to card cloners who then go on a shopping spree.
The problem is not helped by the fact that most establishments no longer ask for ID when one is paying using swipe. This used to be standard practice back in the day but between handling Ecocash payments and the surge in people using swipe after the 2016 cash crises many POS tellers just stopped trying. Strangely not checking ID happens in other countries too, I have used my MasterCard in a couple of countries in Southern Africa and not once have I been asked for my passport.
Chip cards are relatively secure and will hopefully thwart most attacks. While it’s impossible to clone EMV cards they are not immune to igneous hacking but those currently involved in Zimbabwe’s card cloning schemes are not geniuses- they are merely ordinary thieves grabbing at the low hanging fruits that are Magisripe cards.
If you have or an elderly/less technically inclined person hasn’t done so, please tell them to get their card replaced because their current card will stop working soon.
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