theNetherlands

I doubt it matters. Two out of 8 of my cards state on the card that it is the property of the card issuer. A few others say use of the card is subject to the terms. The rest make no statement or property claim on the card. I’m not sure if it’s safe to say all cards are claimed by the issuing bank as their property. In the case of the 2 cards, if someone steals them you could say they’ve stolen the property of my bank. In the other cases it’s unclear who is designated as the victim.

I think it’s irrelevant whose property the cards are. Dutch law would state one way or another whether an ATM can (or must) confiscate cards and in which situations, and that law would have force regardless of who in the world owns the card.

EMV chips can only take a certain amount of abrasion. They can also lose conductivity due to a buildup of film/scum. It’s easy to fix: a pencil eraser works well for making the contacts clean again (if not simply rubbing with your finger fails). If it’s worn out from excessive insertions, simply using a different machine might work because the pins won’t necessarily touch the contacts in precisely the same spot (if you look at an EMV chip, you see some variation in alignment of the scratch lines). I see no case for wanting your dysfunctional card to be seized. If you tell your bank your card is broken beyond recovery, the bank will simply believe you. Unless the ATM can dispense a new replacement card on the spot, the confiscation is only an anti-consumer action.

In principle that’s quite useful that some banks can send you a code that bypasses the need of a card. I personally refuse to run non-free software & exclusive google-distributed software, and apps that refuse to run in a VM, so the apps of all my banks fall very short of my requirements. Most of the websites of my banks are a disaster as well. So I’m mostly an offline customer. Nonetheless it sounds like a useful feature for most of the not-so-fussy population.