If you’ve tried to buy a car lately, you have likely learned more than you care to know about a semi-conductor chip shortage currently choking out new vehicle production. Automakers are far from the only industry threatened by the shortage, however, and banking is now joining the list. Last week, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta produced a blogpost raising concerns that the chip shortage could mean a lack of new chip-enabled cards to issue to customers whose cards are lost, stolen or expired. The post was inspired by an American Banker article that reported, “In the worst-case scenario, some card issuers may need to move into triage mode, replacing only the most active credit and debit cards until microchip supplies catch up to pre-pandemic levels next year.”
