A device introduced by the Polish Bank Association in cooperation with Narodowy Bank Polski enables fast and effective reservation of stolen or lost payment cards without the necessity of having or looking for a telephone number to a concrete bank.
Calling (+48) 828 828 828 from any place in the world, 24 hours a day, by fixed-line telephones as well as cell phones, we may reserve lost or stolen payment cards. It became possible thanks to the automated IVR hotline which uses a technology of voice recognition. A card holder, after saying a name of a concrete bank, will be transferred to a proper hot line of a card issuer. The system recognizes names of banks expressed in different ways, with the consideration of official and common names, abbreviations, and in case of banks with a non-Polish sounding – it will allow to recognize the name in an original language. The operator convinces that thanks to the element of artificial intelligence, the system will automatically adopt new information after each conversation. This device may service many connections at the same time.
The only cost borne by a card holder is a cost of connection consistent with a fee table of a certain operator. The device records a conversation but only from the moment of connection with a system which transfers to a certain bank. Conversations between users and banks are not registered.
The device is not an element of a payment card security network in Poland. It is supposed to serve popularization of operating payments card and development of cashless flow. Many banks which offer payment cards in Poland joined the system.
According to condition provided by NBP, there were 35,2 million of payment cards in the circulation on the Polish market at the end of June 2014. The greatest share had debit cards (81,9 per cent) and credit cards (17,3 per cent). The Poles very rarely used charge cards (merely 0,8 per cent of the totality of payment cards in Poland). Within last year, the number of proximity cards has increased – according to NetB@nk report prepared by the Polish Bank Association and their amount reached the level of 20 million units in Poland.