Forging a Winning Card Experience Partnership

When checking out online and via mobile, today’s cardholders need instant access to their payment cards. The fragmented card experience and processing vendor landscape leads users to experience declined transactions or tedious requests to update their form of payment. Banks and credit unions seeking to improve the card experience for their users face a laundry list of tasks that require a technology partner to handle.

These financial institutions (FIs) have many card vendors and digital banking platforms to choose from, all of which must accommodate the right card systems while ensuring careful handling of the data flowing through these systems. While FIs know what they need, they may not always be keen on what it takes to realize their goals with technology. This blog will help FIs develop a vision for their card experience and partnership with a digital banking vendor.

Finding a card experience built for the future

Most FIs already know they need an adaptable and scalable digital banking platform to deliver a fast, modern card experience for users. But what makes a platform adaptable, scalable, and fast? A platform with these qualities can leverage any system within an FI’s unique card ecosystem and mix and match interactions with multiple parties in that ecosystem to achieve the best solution.

FIs have their pick of platforms that claim adaptability, but it’s important to remember that while there are card vendors that cater to platform infrastructures, adaptability isn’t just about technology. Future-focused FIs need a platform provider with established major card vendor partnerships to ensure that both industry movement and shifting user needs are driving product decisions.

FIs should also look for a platform with purpose-built card integration architecture that allows for quick, clean integrations of new features or vendors to embrace these market changes. This kind of architecture should include a wide breadth of coverage for different cores, issuer processors, and card networks; and the ability to interact with various third-party card systems through a singular interface to remove vendor fragmentation from the user experience.

In order to truly edge out megabanks and fintechs, FIs will need a future-proof card experience strategy that enables continuous innovation. Deep API integrations extend capabilities for personalization and deliver frictionless card updating experiences that can increase card usage, raise interchange income, and inspire loyalty, allowing FIs to engage with users via rapidly growing channels like voice, text, or chat seamlessly.

Providing a card experience built for security

Users have come to expect a digital banking experience that allows payment cards to be used in conjunction with or even without physical cards. Meeting their standards requires visibility over card information, account details, and the ability to add one or more payment cards to their mobile wallet from within your app.

Granting this level of convenience and accessibility isn’t just a user experience concern — it requires a focus on security. Users should be able to easily view information about their cards such as PAN, CVV, and expiration while knowing that information is kept confidential. Mobile security considerations such as step up authentication, auto-hide, and in-transit activation should be discussed with prospective digital banking providers, as well as their degree of PCI compliance. Card control alerts and controls also factor into a secure user experience and provide a level of visibility and service that users expect.

A secure card experience should still also contribute to improving the user experience. For example, as users provide their card information and authenticate themselves in various e-commerce sites, they should also have the option of automatically setting their card as the preferred payment for those sites. If the user experience and security of a digital banking platform don’t go hand in hand, users will feel it, and FIs will hear about it.

Today’s fastest growing share of spend is a user’s e-commerce accounts, which is where FIs are looking to earn a spot as the card on file. For FIs to maintain and grow transaction volume in this way, using cards must be as easy to use online as they are at a retail checkout, and safer. In turn, FIs can gain insights on where cardholders store their cards online in an effort to gain more share of wallet. All this and more is possible with a modern card experience on an innovative digital banking platform. FIs only need to know what to ask for when searching for one.