The problem
Every time you pay by card, the merchant receives your real card number. Most store it. All of them share it through the payment chain. None of them asked your permission to keep it indefinitely.
If you have ever found a subscription impossible to cancel, or noticed your card details appear somewhere you did not give them, you already know what that costs you.
One purchase is not sensitive. The pattern of thousands of purchases over years is. It reveals your health conditions, your political views, your religious practice, your financial vulnerabilities, where you live, what you eat, what you read, what you buy when you are anxious, and what you buy when you feel well.
That pattern is sold, traded, and aggregated by people you have never heard of, for purposes you were never told about.
Insurance companies use purchase histories to set premiums. Political campaigns use spending patterns for targeting. These are not hypothetical uses. They are documented ones.
You have no way to take it back. And no way to know where that information has gone since.
The former chief executive of the global interbank payments network has written that payment data is highly prized by intelligence agencies and commercial actors, and that the current restraints on its use may not hold.
Financial transactions used to be private by default. Nobody asked permission to change that.
How it works
Merchants get paid. They get nothing else.
Your rules
You decide. Before the payment leaves your hands.
Single-use
A virtual card number that works once, then expires automatically. For free trials, one-off purchases, or any merchant you would rather not give a reusable card to. Sign up for a free trial with a single-use number. If you forget to cancel, the charge fails. There is nothing to dispute.
Merchant-locked
Tied to a single merchant. The card is declined everywhere else. Useful for subscriptions you want to control tightly and cancel instantly by deleting the card.
Spend-capped
Set a maximum charge before you pay. The card declines anything above it. Nothing can be taken beyond what you have explicitly authorised.
What we’re building
Before card payments became the default, cash was. Cash left no data trail. The merchant knew you had paid. Nothing else crossed the counter. eigin is being built to restore that property to digital payments. The merchant gets paid. Your real card number stays with you.
That changed gradually, without announcement, and without asking. Your card number became a persistent identifier. Your purchase history became a data asset. The pattern of your financial life became something other people own, and you have no mechanism to recover it.
There is no trade-off between privacy and security here. The card industry already uses tokenisation to protect its own infrastructure from fraud. Apple Pay and Google Pay send a token to the merchant, never your real card number. eigin extends that same mechanism further: not just protecting the card number, but severing the persistent identity link that makes cross-merchant profiling possible. And when a merchant is breached, which happens routinely and at scale, a single-use eigin number that was already used is expired. A merchant-locked number cannot be used anywhere else. The card that gets stolen is already useless.
eigin is being built on a single premise: your financial identity belongs to you. It always did. The infrastructure to return it is what eigin is.
eigin runs on EU-hosted infrastructure. No invasive analytics. Postmark (transactional email) is operated by a US-headquartered company and is covered by standard contractual clauses under UK GDPR. Card issuing will be provided by a regulated partner, to be disclosed at launch. We apply to our own infrastructure the standard we promise to yours.
Things worth knowing
Honest answers to the obvious questions
Privacy products attract scepticism. Good. Here are the direct answers.
UK only · Pre-launch
Join the UK waitlist.
eigin is being built for the UK market.
UK law already treats your financial data as yours. The payment infrastructure has not caught up yet. That is what eigin is being built to fix.
Payment privacy tools exist. None of them work in the UK. That is the gap eigin is being built to close.
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