Good point! Although I’m not sure if they could reissue Visa cards if their contract is to issue MC after a certain date?
This chain then seems to contradict it?
We don’t know the details of their respective contracts with Visa and Mastercard, of course, but it is possible to be issuing both at once depending on various things - as Santander have done, and, to a lesser extent, First Direct.
Santander seemed to have some kind of dependency on Visa processes as part of their new account setup, so continued with Visa Debit for new accounts but any replacement cards were Mastercard.
First Direct updated their new account processes first, and were issuing Mastercard to new customers whilst working to get ready for a mass re-issue for existing customers. This allowed them to meet a cut-off date of the end of September to move all cards away from Visa.
Based on what they’ve tweeted, the cutoff at the NatWest Group looks like June 2023 and new customers should be getting Mastercard now. Existing customers will have their cards replaced “early” in some cases to meet the cut-off date, but also in phases to avoid the need to issue thousands of cards at once.
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Interesting! Sadly their Twitter is of no help. Someone needs to post photos/tell people of their experience
Reading that thread carefully, I would guess that it is completely new customers only for now and existing customers from February 2022.
This is often the case with these things as it ensures that no existing customer is left without a working card while systems are updated. First Direct replaced the cards of some customers with new Visa cards just before the changeover took place, to ensure that nobody had a card which expired right during the changeover. This was most likely to avoid issues if the changeover had to be delayed, and also probably because they briefly had to take “card renewal systems” offline for a period whilst changes were made to them to switch to Mastercard.
I would not be surprised if NatWest did something similar.
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Basically, a TL;DR is that there are two ways to do it:
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Start issuing on the “new card network” to new customers first, and update new customer provisioning systems first - while keeping old systems for existing customers, before migrating them later. This was how First Direct did it.
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Start issuing on the “new card network” for replacement cards only at first, updating the replacement card systems first - while keeping old systems for new customer card issuing, and updating those later. This was how Santander did it.
You can’t really just update all your card systems overnight one weekend in a “big bang” style as there is far too much risk of everything going wrong.
It’s also desirable to issue the new card to existing customers gradually, as it makes support calls and queries easier to deal with.
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The bland designs is one thing I don’t like about cards going portrait with the information on the back. Any bland design looks so much more boring.
Santander’s new design is simple, but looks good, especially when it still has all the information on the front. Same with Nationwide’s.
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I agree that Santander’s new design is quite good, although I’m less of a fan of Nationwide’s (having only seen it online, not in person, so that might not be a fair judgement).
Soon “landscape” (read: traditional) cards are going to be outliers, the way things are going. I wonder whether Monzo are already planning a shift to portrait?
I think Nationwide’s looks a lot better in-person. It is difficult to take of photo of it that makes it look how it does in-person.
It will only really be NatWest, Nationwide, Santander, First Direct, and Monzo that have landscape cards. Don’t quite understand the shift the portrait so I’m happy there will still be a few landscape around.
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It’s because cards are inserted these days, rather than swiped, and more are stored vertically in phone cases, which wasn’t a thing when cards were invented.
It never really made any sense that the mag strip was on the upper half of the reverse side, meaning the card had to be upside down to swipe. It would always have made much more sense for the design to have been flipped rendering the mag strip on the lower half.
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But then it just means that the back of the card in most cases is landscape anyway to fit all the information on, making the whole thing a tad pointless.
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Not always. Tymit have a portrait print on the back of the card and the numbers go down the card in rows of 4. It actually looks quite nice how they did it. Very pleasing to the eye
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It’s why I said “in most cases”. I remember seeing one or two that were portrait on the back. I agree that it looked nice. Is there a reason why this isn’t possible for most other portrait cards?
Why does it have to be one thing or the other? Why not portrait on the obverse, landscape on the other?
Personally, I think cards just look better landscape, so I’m hoping the portrait fad doesn’t catch on beyond the incumbents trying to be Starling and make themselves look fresh.
Portrait both cramps everything and makes the card feel a bit heavy towards one of its sides. It’s hard to work with. Stuff typically goes in one of the corners, and there’s much less horizontal space to wake with. Which means we get designs that feel both empty and cramped at the same time. And because so many banks seem to possess a phobia of blank space, you get a huge monstrosity plastered over the middle as well, which is often just a duplicate of the logo that’s probably already in the top left corner.
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Halifax 
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Doesn’t look very good imo so for essentially next to no benefit, I don’t see the point.
It seems to have caught on. TSB, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, RBS. Most have switched to portrait now.
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Lloyds hasn’t switched to portrait/vertical cards yet, except for their new Smart Start account for 11 -15 year olds. Whether they change the rest of their cards remains to be seen.
That is exactly what happened with Halifax though. They showed their Smart Spending account as portrait a bit before the rest, then they all started to switch. I assume Lloyds will be doing the exact same thing.
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Only really the incumbents though. Monzo’s newest card designs are still landscape. Revolut’s too (and they’re forever tweaking their card designs!). Apple’s is landscape. So is Chase’s. N26’s cards are still landscape. Majority of the US fintechs are landscape cards too.
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