Where to Store Bank Card Details and PINs Safely on Your Phone
Notes apps and screenshots are where card numbers and PINs leak from. A better way to keep Visa, Mastercard and bank details on your phone.
Most of us keep some card or bank details on our phones: a card number for online shopping, a PIN we can never remember, a sort code for paying a friend. The question is where.
Places not to keep them
- Notes apps. Usually not encrypted with a separate lock, and often synced.
- Screenshots and photos of cards. They sit in your gallery and cloud backup with your holiday snaps.
- Messages to yourself. Searchable by anyone holding your unlocked phone.
- Contacts ("Bank PIN: 4821"). More common than you'd think.
What good looks like
- Encrypted with a lock that isn't your phone's screen lock.
- Hidden fields, so the number isn't on screen until you tap.
- Clipboard that clears itself, so a copied number doesn't linger.
- Offline, so there's no online account to break into.
How Vault This does it
Add a Bank card record and the app gives you fields for the name, number, expiry, security code and PIN. The tile only ever shows the last four digits. Secret fields stay hidden until you tap, and anything you copy clears after a minute.
There's also a Codes and PINs record for bank details, recovery codes and the PINs you can never remember.
And if your card is lost
Save your bank's lost or stolen card number in the same vault. It's the one number you need when your wallet's gone.
