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Citigroup Inc. will nearly quadruple the number of signature-debit cards it issues with today's purchase of Wachovia Corp. At the end of 2007, Wachovia issued 10.4 million Visa-branded debit cards, which cardholders in December used to initiate 139.4 million purchases, according to PaymentsSource.com, a CardLine sister Web site. They used signatures to conduct 81.2 million purchases that month and PINs to conduct 58.2 million purchases. Citi issued an estimated 4.7 million debit MasterCards and 1.7 million PIN-only cards at the end of 2007. Cardholders used Citi's debit cards to initiate an estimated 21 million signature-debit purchases and 12.4 million PIN-debit purchases in December. The deal also has the potential to benefit MasterCard Worldwide, as New York-based Citi may convert Wachovia's Visa-branded cards to MasterCard. Though Citi has not made such an announcement, its possible conversion of Wachovia's debit cards to MasterCard comes less than a week after MasterCard received some bad news. JPMorgan Chase & Co., which on Thursday purchased Seattle-based Washington Mutual Inc., said it would convert WaMu's debit cards to Visa from MasterCard. "MasterCard can stand to win big in the future," Adil Moussa, an analyst with Aite Group, said in a statement. "This represents an opportunity for MasterCard to regain some of the ground lost to Visa after [Royal Bank of Scotland Group] announced that it was moving all of its debit volume to Visa and the potential change of networks from MasterCard to Visa if WaMu's MasterCard portfolio is converted by JPMorgan Chase."
