What are the benefits of personalized debit cards?

This is why implementing agile card personalization and instant card issuing solutions are key for banks and financial institutions to keep up with the transformation and step up of their offerings. In fact, for the last couple of years, 63% of the top banks and credit unions have adopted these technologies to position top-of-wallet card products and services.

Still, the benefits of card issuance and personalization services are not limited to enabling banks to provide personalized offerings. Let’s take a closer look at all the cost efficiency, security, and retention improvements these services generate for banks.

Enhanced Security

Improving data security and integrity is one of the key benefits of card personalization. As the process consists of writing sensitive cardholder data on card chips and securing them with cryptographic methods, it ensures that only authorized cardholders can use the card, which reduces the risk of card skimming or fraudsters.

In addition, credit and debit card personalization requires following EMV rules and should be compatible with PCI and PA standards. This way, debit and credit card personalization allows secure and confidential data transmission between all parties involved.

Increased Customer Loyalty

With innovative and flexible mass and instant issuance solutions, banks can offer customized card products designed with cardholders’ photos, biometric information, or email addresses, which is a great way to create a deeper connection with customers, making them feel valued and appreciated.

Also, in some countries, point, catalog, or discount-based loyalty card programs can be combined with personalized EMV cards to improve the customer experience even more and guarantee increased customer loyalty, retention, card usage, and spending.

Increased Operational Efficiency

To handle mass and instant card personalization, banks need to carry out a variety of software developments and upgrades in real-time and consider all the components, like printing devices, local or international schemes, regulations, and PIN transfers.

By eliminating all these costly processes and hassles, holistic card issuing solutions allow banks to print personalized credit and debit cards instantly, expand operational efficiency, and hold competitive power to generate more valuable offerings for cardholders.

Still, payment card personalization is a long, complex process, including building a brand-based EMV profile, creating the right chips for cards, and running certification tests. Therefore, to get the best out of your personalized card products, you need a reliable and experienced payment service provider on board.

Put Your Card Products on the Map with PayCore Instant & Mass Issuing Solutions

We know that EMV requires unique know-how. With our vision and 20+ years of experience in payment technologies, we provide a complete instant & mass issuing platform and customizable EMV card printing services for our partners to help them create secure, valuable, and efficient debit, credit, and prepaid card products.

Here is an in-depth look at our holistic instant & mass issuing solution.

Supporting International & Local Schemes

Our personalization platform and issuing solutions support the personalization of Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, and UPI cards, as well as local schemes. They also support all card types, including credit, debit, prepaid, and multi-application cards.

Complete Security & PCI DSS Compliant

PayCore’s mass & instant issuing solutions and platform ensure that sensitive cardholder data is kept secure at all stages and not revealed, saved, handled, or transmitted in a malicious way. Also, these solutions provide complete security and encryption from the back end to the card printing machine and chip.

One Stop Shop For Personalization

Supporting various printing machines, card products, and chip vendors, our instant & mass issuing platform provides holistic card personalization solutions as well as card stock management, payment card applications, printer devices, hardware security module, cryptographic firmware, plastic cards, and quality assurance tools.

Providing personalized card products in only three minutes is possible with the PayCore Card Personalization platform! Let’s join forces to help you commence new payment programs and card products quickly and easily.

Contact Us  

Did you know that 64% of households in New Zealand have a pet, and that the estimated 4.6 million pets outnumber their Kiwi owners? That is why it is no surprise that a preferred theme for New Zealanders’ personalised banking card is a picture of their pet.   

Providing the best user experience is paramount to the success of financial institutions. This is why leading banks in New Zealand, such as our customer ANZ Bank, have started offering a web service that enables cardholders to upload a picture of their pet, then receive a personalised payment card using that pet picture as artwork. 

While for New Zealanders ‘pets’ is the most popular theme, the concept of card artwork can be easily expanded to include a favourite football or rugby club, brands, or other affiliated visuals. Customers can select an existing image from a library offering multiple themes or upload a personal picture.  

How does card personalisation work? 

 

Beyond the cool look-and-feel of these cards, the technology behind this is fascinating. The ability for a customer to have a customised image on their card is a complex offering. It requires an integrated software application and post-production audit process to validate that the image falls under the specific ISO standards. One such tool is the Thales Gemalto AllAboutMe personal card design software that allows users to make their payment cards truly personal. Here’s how the customisation process works.  

The first step of personalising debit/ credit cards is to validate the image that the customer has shared with their bank. This is required as customers will occasionally submit pictures that don’t fit the specifications and therefore cannot be printed on the body of the card.  

 Secondly, in order to create a great artwork on the card (just like the cat displayed above), the design process needs to adhere to ISO specifications. For example, the silicon chip frame position cannot be changed, while the payment scheme and the bank’s logos, as well as other features such as the name on the card, need to seamlessly co-habit with the artwork. Imagine if the head of the cat was hidden by the lead frame – this could look quite unpleasant! To ensure that all these specific requirements are met, an automatic zoom and shift algorithm must be applied to the cardholder’s uploaded picture in order to optimise the overall look-and-feel of the card. 

Finally, as the service is available on the bank’s website, it needs to be attractive, secure and very easy to use. Users need to have clear guidance around how to upload the right pictures, including simple insights into the pick-and-place selection process.

Benefits of card personalisation 

 

Customising payment cards can be a great traffic booster for online banking services. In addition, a personalised card is likely to become top of wallet for the cardholder, which means more transactions, and therefore higher revenue for the issuing banks and their partner payment schemes.  

In fact, according to an independent report by Aite Group, financial institutions that provide card artwork for customers saw an average increase of 6% in card activation in 2018. Furthermore, the custom card product outperformed the generic card offering at an average increase of 21% in transactions, and showed an average increase of 18% in customer retention.  

Card personalisation allows customers to identify with their card, which in turn creates loyalty. The popularity of the ‘pets’ card among New Zealanders means that the banking card is not just one of many smart cards in a user’s wallet, but has become a very personal object that can say a lot about someone. In fact, the bank card speaks for its owner. For example, the cardbody material is an adhesion message to the value carried, while the personal picture on the card has a unicity message about the cardholder.   

The key driver for customising bank cards is the bond it creates between the cardholder, the card and the issuers. One thing for sure is that in 2021, the trend for people to pay more attention to their banking card and its look-and-feel is growing – and they have plenty of options to choose from, whether metal, bio-sources made, biometric or a card customised with a personal image.