As a lot of new and old challenger banks are starting to design their cards vertically, why not monzo? The design is, in my opinion, so much cleaner and moves all details to the back of the card, only keeping the chip and monzo & mastercard logo.
A design I think looks perfect and makes the card look so much more modern is this concept: https://dribbble.com/shots/5018055-Monzo-Vertical-Debit-Card
I have no doubt whatsoever that they’ve looked at doing this.
For whatever reason, they’ve decided not to go forward with it. Yet.
Monzo have chosen to stick to embossed numbers on a horizontal card for compatibility reasons for now. @Rika has mentioned this a few times.
I think over the next few years, some of these compatibility reasons are going to start going away/become less important. Especially as the world moves aware from more insecure technologies like the magstripe and online payments become disconnected from the physical card.
I like that design, but it’s really not needed. Monzo have lots more to focus on.
Also, mixing portrait and landscape cards sounds like a manufacturing pain, unless you do it from the start (like Starling did).
Definitely a compatibility issue - I’ve heard of supermarket card systems going down and payments being taken by the old brass-rubbing style technique using the raised numbers.
These little bits of compatibility might seem inconsequential, but if Monzo want to persuade the more reluctant switchers, it helps!
But Starling had a horizontal card, and continued to issue it to joint account holders for a time after the vertical card was released.
It’s not as bad as you’d think. Most of the rotation is just in artwork and in about three areas of personalisation. When moving from fixed embossed personalisation to these durable printed methods, you gain a lot of positional flexibility anyway.
It’s possible to mix durable printing and embossing in a single machine line and have cards skip the stage if they don’t need anything done to them. We’ve been experimenting with mixing both to print Investor or Joint labels on individual cards, rather than holding a stock of each possible combination.