I have no idea if this was the case, but my theory on that is that the cards were designed that way to reduce wear on the magnetic strip. Magstripes are actually fairly fragile, and can easily be damaged or demagnetised. The logic may have been that having it run across the bottom of the card would mean it was constantly being shoved in and out of a wallet/purse pocket, and this friction could damage it. Whereas at the top it is generally in the part of the wallet slot where it is “sticking out” of the top, and not rubbing against the material. Clearly this doesn’t account for portrait wallets, but they are fairly rare even now and certainly they were even more rare back in the “old days”.
This is something I’ve never understood. Apart from having a bulky phone case, which makes using your phone as either a camera or a phone difficult and awkward, surely these cases interfere with Apple Pay and other NFC-based technologies. I’ve even seen people with minimalist cases where they jam a debit or credit card in the back, between the phone and case. I would be worried about card embossing scratching my phone, damage to the structural integrity of a well-fitting phone+case (and it’s ability to protect my phone) and, most ridiculously, it would make Apple Pay impossible. It would also be very awkward to have to remove the card for a PIN transaction under SCA.
I believe that format is called “Visa Quick Scan”, and we may see more of it in the future.
Mastercard also have something similar, and you saw it demonstrated in their article about phasing-out magstripe.
Clearly that is the design that the card networks are, eventually, aiming for. I suspect that banks have pushed back on it in the meantime under the principle of it being better to change things slowly to avoid riling customers - so they will first develop portrait cards where they can say “just flip it over, it’s just like your old card on the back”, then they will phase out the magstripe and signature so the back can take on the newer format design.
You were thinking of HSBC when you wrote this, weren’t you!
It’s not always bad, I think some of the designs that have come out recently have just looked so bad it’s reflected badly on portrait as a concept. HSBC’s portrait lion design, in Hong Kong, is beautiful and looks even better than the lions did in landscape. I think it’s about designing to the format, which many banks haven’t done, and have instead just followed the kind of easy logic you’ve just described. Which has boiled down, in lots of cases, to sticking a massive logo on the card and being done with it. That is always going to result in an uninspiring design.
True, but with the banks that have switched already it’s going to shortly mean the vast majority of cards out there in the U.K., just in terms of market share.
Personally, I quite like landscape cards because my wallet is landscape and I don’t want to replace it. Apple Pay is also landscape and I like that (I don’t think I want Apple to change the software so it goes portrait).
So portrait cards have two problems as I see it, aside from the design issues of fitting everything on well without looking uneven:
Somehow looking good even in landscape wallet slots.
Tweaking/modifying the design to fit in with digital wallets, while still being distinctive enough that it’s clearly “the brand” (even though it doesn’t match the physical card). Also, doing this in a way that doesn’t come across as lazy and uninteresting - like HSBC’s “our brand is a massive hexagon, let’s put that on everything”, or Halifax’s “our brand is a massive X”. Virgin Money have actually managed this fairly well, but probably only because their card design is relatively simple.
PS: I’ve just had another related thought on this.
Amex’s recently-redesigned British Airways card did this quite well, only the opposite way round. It is a landscape card with American Express branding sideways along the left-hand side. This means that you can put it left-side up in a portrait wallet and see the branding, but it also looks good as a design feature in landscape wallets. First Direct’s old Visa design, where the branding was sideways in landscape, was also a similar idea.
I wouldn’t expect MagSafe itself to cause any interference, since Apple has clearly designed that to a high degree of precision and extensively tested it before putting it into production.
The MagSafe Wallet most likely also has some RFID shielding to prevent the cards from being activated by the contactless terminal, so in a way that’s a special case and not the same thing.
I would expect putting contactless cards in the back of random el cheapo silicone cases to interfere with Apple Pay though. That’s more what I had noticed people doing.
It’s not just cards.
We have a constant problem with people keeping their tickets in their phone cases, and when they try to scan the QR code, our (contactless enabled) machines try to take payment from their Apple/Google pay.
Mag stripes were originally just for cash machine use. Credit cards weren’t swiped anywhere, they were used in click-clack machines, and debit cards were yet to be invented. When click-click gave way to swiping, the cards had the stripe at the top because that’s where it had always been on the old cash machine cards.
Yes it was, and you could only get £10 out. To be fair, that was a lot of money back in 1967 when Barclays opened the world’s first cash machine. The first ATM using a mag stripe card was introduced by Lloyds in 1972.
By 1987, when Barclays brought out the UK’s first debit card, the mag stripe already had an established position at the top of the cards. We didn’t get chip and PIN until 2003-2004, and contactless only in 2007 when Barclaycard started it.
