A Card Is Not a Product

The good part about being inside an industry is the opportunity to gain deep knowledge of how the wheels and gears of that industry work. The bad part about being in an industry is the Kool-Aid. There are concepts created by the industry that have at best, tenuous links to reality.

Here is one example.

I spent years promoting and implementing different “card products”.

There were:

• Credit “card products”:

  • Commercial,

  • Fleet, and

  • Consumer core, enhanced, and premium – what I used to call “gold, frankincense and myrrh” cards,

• Pre-funded “card products”:

  • Debit cards,

  • Prepaid cards,

  • Stored value cards,

• Funky and even innovative “card products”:

  • Tap cards,

  • Card-on-phone,

  • Curved-edge cards,

  • Battery-powered biometric cards,

  • Metal cards, etc.

Recently, while consulting for a Product team in a financial institution, I had the following epiphany. . .

A card is not a product.

A card is an access device. It is an interface between a user (cardholder – the person holding the card) and a product they want to access. That product may be:

• A gym or a club or a store – the card being the membership identification and access device to get into the premises,

• A hotel room and other hotel amenities – most hotels I have stayed at in the last decade or more have used access cards to provide secure entrance to the room I had reserved.

• Public transit access – whether the transit card is prepaid, tied debit, stored value, or linked to a credit card, this one card provides access to every bus, train, and streetcar in a transit system. Well implemented solutions even manage transfers between transit vehicles.

Oh, it looks like I forgot one card use – intentionally. . .

What about a banking card?

In each of my listed examples, the customer buys or signs up for the product. The card is merely an access device to the product.

For example, if I want the eclectic mix of good quality, well-priced products and services that are the Costco product, I sign up for a Costco membership. The card is a secondary item – critically important to access the product I have signed up for – but it is never identified as “the product” itself.

Unfortunately, many bank product and executive teams I have worked with still consider payment cards “a product”. In doing so, they shortchange themselves, their institution, and, ultimately, their customers. The market is flooded with generic credit, debit, and prepaid products. Their issuers spend far too much money trying to entice the public to try this “thing” that doesn’t have any connection with the customers’ lives, needs, or ambitions. . .

It's like selling car keys without a car.

Once I had this epiphany, I took the word “card” out of my conversation with this FI’s product team.

I challenged them:

1. What customer need or ambition are you looking to fulfill?

2. What is your target market? (Either of these two points can be first leading to the other as a second point.)

3. What resources currently available in your institution can address that need or ambition?

4. What resources must be added to your institution to address that need or ambition?

5. Let’s build a product – maybe 3 products that are different ways to address this target demographic and its need, or ambition.

6. Only when we have built multiple product solutions and determined the best one(s), should we begin the conversation of “what utility should we use to allow secure access to this product?" It may be a card, or a token, or an app, or a combination of these – or something very different.

As you can see, determining the best access device is a consequence of:

• Defining the product,

• The environment(s) the product will it be used in, and

• How the product will be used.

Though the access device is a critically important thing – it is one of the last things to be added to a product.

So, what products are your teams working on?

Is your institution’s stable filled with products, or is it simply a rack of “keys missing the car”?

I would love to help you as you work to answer those questions. I can help you position or reposition yourself to be an institution with pertinent, compelling products.