why do credit cards have an expiration date?

Question

I get needing expiration dates back when they first came out, but it seems sort of antiquated in today’s world.

In: 17

Answer 1

A bit more details to the card security mentioned in the above comments, all the credit cards of at least visa and Mastercard are personalized with an Emv digital certificate which has an expiry date(way longer than the expiry date of the card in most cases). These certificates do expire and new ones are created with longer key lengths and expiry dates. So to give you a card with new a new certificate, your card needs to be renewed.