CardMarketing 2.0

Allowing people to customize their credit, debit and gift cards with images of their own is a rapidly growing trend across the banking community globally, and a reaction to the rampant consumer demand for personalization. It's not just about satisfying consumer demand, either...

Experience shows that customized cards result in improved acquisition, activation, retention and usage rates. Very simply, people can relate to a card with a picture, say, of their grandchildren on it, and will tend to use it a whole lot more than a card with just another corporate logo and predictable design. Customized cards are a fast-track to front of wallet.

Now, I'm not banging on about the benefits of card customization just because Serverside, the company that sponsors this blog, is the one that kickstarted the whole customization thing (that needs to be made clear because if there's one thing this blog is not, it's bent). I'm banging on about it because a company called Befunky.com could take card customization a step further and make it more exciting still.



Befunky.com, another of the hot start-ups invited to the recent TechCrunch 40 conference (covered in the previous post) is a fantastic new website that provides users with online tools — under the name of Uvatar and Cartoonizer — that allow you to turn a straighforward digital image of yourself or a family member into something so much more fun. This could be a personalized avatar (or 'Uvatar'), a cartoon-like image, a digital painting or even a comic book figure.

Whichever image you choose, you can warp it, colour it and even dress it up (see below — basically, it's like something out of Weird Science).


The end result can then be used in social networking sites, on blogs, in websites and even on your phone. I just wonder if this technology could be applied to the the design of payment cards. Now that would be cool and, for the first mover I'm sure, pretty damn lucrative.

Nb. This site is so hot off the press that it's not available to the public yet, so you might have to wait a week or two before you can try the technology out for yourself.