Collected thoughts on card design (Part 1)

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As soon as you go into a branch & mention the “M” word, staff give you that look like “the forbidden word😂” they probably all laugh about it now. TSB must’ve thought it was a case of flipping the switch & that’s it done.

It’ll take TSB some years to get to where they want to be but I see they’ve started changing their branding away from the cartoon drawings to a more “‘mature” concept & they’re changing the design of their cards to what looks like Starling “portrait” version. It actually looks nice :laughing:

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Ooo are they? Where is this at?

I use TSB and to be honest I like them. I like that the app is fairly simple and easy to use, and (somewhat) has logos for purchases.

It’s by no means perfect and I miss a lot of the things Monzo do, but it works well for me and I’ve never had an issue with their customer service.

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Here :wink:

https://www.grupbancsabadell.com/corp/files/1454346867744/201911_tsb_strategic_update_tsb_investor_section_final_pres_-_22.11.pdf

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It also looks like the card has the corner cut off…

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Nothing will best the Mint card I had back in the day (though it was only for a balance transfer so stayed in the envelope):
MINT - Welcome to MINT Credit Cards and Insurance

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It’s not the corner that’s cut off, it’s just like a little grove for your finger to push/pull the card in/out the reader I think haha

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Looks like a slightly bigger version of the Transferwise notch

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It looks very nice!

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I think it’s to help partially sighted customers to easily tell which way up it is.

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Didn’t even think of that! That’s good too!

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Random question but does the Starling card have any way for people that have sight problems to know which way they are meant to be inserting their card? I know TSB and Virgin Money (and I think NatWest) has a notch on the side of their card which helps.

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No it doesn’t.

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Any ideas why? You’d think this would be quite important.

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You’d hope it’ll become part of the international standard for bank cards.

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I don’t know why they didn’t do the notch, like Transferwise and others

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It seems to be a fairly recent thing.

The first card that I had with it on was Transferwise, about 3 years ago.

I think RBS did launch a special new Holt’s Military Banking card with it in about 2016 though, so that may have been the first?

It then spread to the whole RBS/NatWest portfolio of cards, before being picked up by others like Virgin Money and TSB.

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Here’s the press release for it.

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RBS/NatWest have had accessible cards for years upon request. They were a world-first. Holt’s was the first bank to make all its debit cards accessible by design.

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Without sounding too insensitive does it make a big difference?

I get that a notch is alot more obvious but isnt feeling for a notch and feeling for the chip side not similar?

Or is it the seeing the notch missing looks very different for partially sighted people?

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I’d imagine it would. Try it yourself on an unembossed card with your eyes closed. I just tried it on my starling card. I could tell which way round it was, but I had to run my fingers over the whole card, with Transferwise, it was easy to tell which way up and which way round the card was.

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