Here in the UK, we’ve had credit cards since the 60s, though the term was thought to be first coined as far back as 1887 by the novellist Edward Bellamy. So perhaps this fresh look at their design is overdue.
Portrait bank cards are a thing now
Consider the ways you use your bank card on an everyday basis, whether handing it over to a cashier, swiping it to make contactless payments, or inserting it into an ATM. How are you holding the card as you do all those things? Vertically, I’m willing to bet, or in portrait orientation, to borrow a term. And yet, the vast majority of credit and debit cards are designed in landscape, sticking to a thoroughly outdated usage model. This is the senseless design inertia that the UK’s Starling Bank is rowing against with its newly unveiled portrait card design, which was spotted by Brand New.
There’s more info on the reasons behind the change on the bank’s website.
Introducing our new card
Design usually evolves to solve something or to meet new needs, and bank cards don’t look the way they do by accident. They were designed landscape because of the way old card machines worked, and they’re embossed with raised numbers so they could be printed onto a sales voucher.
But we don’t use those machines anymore, so when you think about it, a landscape card is just a solution to a ‘problem’ that no longer exists. At Starling, we think it’s important that we can justify every decision we make – and we just couldn’t find a reason good enough to carry on using a design based on antiquated needs.
That first article from The Verge identifies a number of other banks and companies that have gone vertical. I’ve had a portrait Co-op membership card in my wallet for ages now, since their rebrand.
Speaking of credit cards, here’s an interesting article about how companies across the globe are turning to AI to help assess credit ratings in what they claim to be a fairer and more transparent way. That’s the idea, anyway…
Algorithms are making the same mistakes assessing credit scores that humans did a century ago
It used to be that credit card companies would just be sneakily looking at transaction data to infer worthiness:
In the US, every transaction processed by Visa or MasterCard is coded by a “merchant category“—5122 for drugs, for example; 7277 for debt, marriage, or personal counseling; 7995 for betting and wagers; or 7273 for dating and escort services. Some companies curtailed their customers’ credit if charges appeared for counseling, because depression and marital strife were signs of potential job loss or expensive litigation.
Now the data trawl is much wider:
ZestFinance’s patent describes the use of payments data, social behavior, browsing behaviors, and details of users’ social networks as well as “any social graph informational for any or all members of the borrower’s network.” Similarly, Branch’s privacy policy mentions such factors as personal data, text message logs, social media data, financial data, and handset details including make, model, and browser type.
In these situations it becomes hard to tell what data, or combinations of data, are important — and even harder to do anything about it if these automated decisions go against us.
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