Americans could soon carry fewer physical credit and debit cards

NEW YORK — Your wallet may soon be getting thinner.

Visa on Wednesday announced major changes to how credit and debit cards will operate in the United States in the coming months and years.

The new features could mean Americans will be carrying fewer physical cards in their wallets, making the 16-digit credit or debit card number printed on every card increasingly irrelevant.

They will be some of the biggest changes to how payments operate in the U.S. since chip-embedded cards were rolled out several years ago. They also come as Americans have many more options to pay for purchases beyond “credit or debit,” including buy-now, pay-later companies; peer-to-peer payment options; paying directly with a bank; or digital payment systems like Apple Pay.

“I think (with these features) we’re getting past the point where consumers may never need to manually enter an account number ever again,” said Mark Nelsen, Visa’s global head of consumer payments.

The biggest change coming for Americans will be the ability for banks to issue one physical payment card that will be connected to multiple bank accounts. That means no more carrying, for example, a Bank of America or Chase debit card as well as their respective credit cards in a physical wallet.

Americans will be able to set criteria with their bank — such as having all purchases below $100 or with a certain merchant applied to the debit card, while other purchases go on the credit card.

The feature, already being used in Asia, will be available this summer. Buy-now, pay-later company Affirm is the first of Visa’s customers to roll out the feature in the United States.

Some of Visa’s new features are in response to online-payment fraud, which continues to increase as more countries adopt digital payments. The San Francisco-based company estimates that payment fraud happens roughly seven times more often online than it does in person.