Credit card re-issue was proactive move, says Westpac

Westpac has claimed its move to cancel and reissue 30,000 New Zealand credit cards last week was a “proactive” one.

The cancellation came after a data breach of event ticketing company Ticketmaster in June.

Despite only one New Zealand customer being known to be a victim of the breach, Westpac still cancelled and reissued 30,000 of its Mastercard credit cards.

Tiffany Ryan, Westpac NZ’s head of financial crime and security, said the bank had been "made aware that the Ticketmaster-related data security incident could potentially affect our customers and we’ve been monitoring all activity closely since.

"We have strong fraud controls in place.”

Ms Ryan said she could not comment on what those controls were for security reasons.

The New Zealand Banking Association’s (NZBA) acting-chief executive, Antony Buick-Constable, said the decision how to best deal with such incidents of fraud and data breaches was down to the banks.

“When one bank may decide to reissue all affected cards . . . another may have a different response based on the actual or potential threat,” he said.

Kara Tait, external communications manager for Kiwibank, said investigating data breaches was done for her bank by a “huge team who work to ensure the security of our customers.”

Both the Bank of New Zealand and the ANZ said dealing with fraud incidents was done on a case-by-case basis.

ANZ’s spokeswoman, Emma Mellow, said that in the case of the Ticketmaster breach, “[ANZ] have blocked and replaced a number of cards and all impacted customers have been reimbursed".

She also said the bank had increased monitoring on any cards potentially compromised by the breach.

A Bank of New Zealand spokeswoman said the bank would not be reissuing cards on a large scale.

“We’re confident in the security of our cards, our monitoring and our fraud-protection tools,” she said.

Meanwhile, ASB said it was keeping a close eye on the situation.

“With respect to Ticketmaster . . . we have implemented additional fraud monitoring,” its spokeswoman said.