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What the OP said was that even with a 6 digit BIN and 1 digit check, you have 9 digits available per BIN. For example, Mastercards start in the range 51 to 55.
by rswail 6y ago
What the OP said was that even with a 6 digit BIN and 1 digit check, you have 9 digits available per BIN.
For example, Mastercards start in the range 51 to 55. That leaves 4 digits of the 6 digit BIN to allocate to MC issuers. So that's a total of 50K issuers of MC world wide, then each of those issuers can have 1 billion cards.
So each issuer of a MC in Japan can issue a card to each member of the population and only use an eighth of their allocated range.
The problem isn't the individual card account ID, from the article, it sounds like Japan has been allocating too many BINs.
- hrktb 6y ago> an eight of their allocated range Assuming your calculations are correct, this means an issuer can only emit 8 cards in average to the total population. Cards have an expiration, people lose them, break them, they change and come back to banks. For the main issuers it’s not ridiculous to have to issue 20 or 30 cards per account to a user in their lifetime. Then people have multiple accounts (e.g. my mortgage was on a separate join account). There’s just enough normal circumstances to run out of numbers, not even considering freak cases.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]