I work in accommodation for international travelers, and people can pay with various kinds of cards:
- In some countries such as USA, credit cards are very common, but debit cards are not so common.
- In other regions such as Europe, most people have debit cards, but credit cards are quite a bit less common.
- These days in Australia both kinds of cards are very common.
Often customers are confused when I ask if they want to pay (or make a reservation) with credit card because they know they have a debit card and not a credit card. And there are other kinds of cards like ATM cards and EFTPOS cards. These can be used for payment but not for making reservations because they cannot be charged without access to the physical cards.
I've taken to using the circumlocution "Mastercard or Visa card", but I wonder if there's a better term? For instance Maestro cards are related to Mastercards and usually work here too.
All the cards have the same form factor and either/both a magnetic strip and/or smartcard chip. They are all processed with the same machine.
A few weeks ago I stumbled across the term "payment card" on Wikipedia, that I couldn't recall hearing before. I thought this would be the right term, but it seems not to include ATM cards so I guess I should rule it out …
(My second reason for looking for this term is to decide on which tag or tags to use for such cards over on travel.SE, where we currently only have a credit-cards tag, but more and more questions about the other kinds of cards too.)
Best Answer
The industry itself uses the term Payment Card. See this Wikipedia article for details. In IT you frequently hear the term "PCI compliant" to refer to software that meets security standards set out by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council, a consortium of players in the payment card business.
In practice the term isn't used often, but if you're looking for a single term I don't think there's a better one out there. I think the reason most merchants spell out which types of payment cards they take - "Visa, Mastercard, ATM and gift cards" for example - is because there's a lot of choices out there and most places do not accept all of them.