A Radical Change Comes to the Way Large Credit Cards Work – BGR

• The credit cards that dominate the consumer habits of so many consumers, from companies ranging from Mastercard to Visa and even Apple with its Apple Card, are changing the look and feel consumers have expected from these card products.
  
• Credit cards are increasingly adopting a vertical orientation.
• This comes as apps like TikTok and Instagram accommodate the world for vertical scrolling input, and it also reflects how most consumers use their credit cards anyway – by inserting them vertically into disk readers, for example.

---

Here’s something I bet most you did not see coming: TikTok and Instagram are such great cultural forces in the world today, that they are quietly influencing the design of credit cards, of all things.

PayPal has recently introduced new debit and credit card vertical designs for its Venmo app, which according to a company manager is partly inspired by the vertical orientation of the popular social media applications. Daniela Jorge, vice president of design at PayPal, said Bloomberg in a recent interview that this is now just the way the whole world thinks. And what are the expectations of people for apps and consumer products like credit cards. “The world around us is becoming more of the portrait mode and the vertical orientation,” Jorge said.

Today’s Top Deal Amazon buyers can’t stop these $ 20 sneakers Price:$ 19.99 BGR is available on Amazon and may receive a commission Buy now Available at Amazon BGR may receive a commission

Besides PayPal, big banks are already moving in this direction. Bank of America, the second largest supplier of debit card products in the United States, was one of the first to adopt a debit card with a portrait-oriented orientation. Similarly, in 2018, Discovery Bank began offering vertical credit cards. And the reasons why we would expect this trend to continue, with more banks adopting a vertical style for their card products, include the fact that with the advent of disk readers and tap-to-pay functionality, this is how most people cards already handled.

For example, with a slide reader, the credit card is placed vertically in the reader. As digital wallets increase in popularity – with cardholders increasingly using a digital version of their credit card stored on their smartphone – the phone becomes the device the consumer pays for, rather than a physical card. And phones are, of course, used vertically. When Apple released its new credit card product Apple Card, I did not bother at all to get a physical version of the card. I signed up and was approved for the credit card, which I keep in my iPhone’s wallet app and use it vertically as I simply wave the phone in front of a card reader.

Think about the last time you handed your card to someone to swing horizontally through a reader. It’s probably been a while, right? Now consider that Experian, two years after these cards were introduced for smart payment chips, says that US banks have issued more than 855 million of them. Incidentally, these are called EMV cards, which originally stood for Europay, Mastercard and Visa – the credit card companies that created this new payment standard.

“Changing our debit cards to a vertical layout is about more than what the cards look like,” said April Schneider, head of consumer and small business products. Bloomberg. “The vertical layout distinguishes the debit card from other cards used by customers, and the addition of ‘tap-to-pay’ makes the card faster and safer to use at checkout.”

Today’s Top Deal How come this Alexa speaker is only $ 15 at Amazon today? Price: BGR is available on Amazon and may receive a commission Buy now Available at Amazon BGR may receive a commission