Consumer expectations are changing across the board. The world has become faster and more digitized. Payments in particular have been moving towards real-time operations for years, further expedited by the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, physical credit and debit card issuance can still move at a snail’s pace. The solution? Digital issuance. 

To learn more about whether digital issuance of new or lost debit and credit cards is important and relevant to cardholders, PaymentsJournal sat down with Randy Piatt, Vice President of Product Solutions and Marketing at Fiserv and Sarah Grotta, Director of Debit and Alternative Products Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group. 

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The transformation of cardholder expectations 

Payments industry professionals have been prophesizing exponential growth towards digitization for years now, and only very recently have those theories been borne out. “We’ve had digital wallets since 2014 or so,” said Piatt. “We keep talking about the time that people are suddenly going to shift overwhelmingly to digital, and it was always, ‘It’s next year, it’s next year, it’s next year…’ What we found in the pandemic was an actual tipping point that forced people to be digital.” 

Financial institution customers by and large want to interact digitally with their bank, rather than needing to call or meet in person. This preference holds for all people irrespective of demographic, facilitated by the massive digital adoption resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. “We used to talk about the digital divide,” noted Grotta. “That divide is really blurring now.” The definition of “digital native” is broadening to include older generations. 

Merchants are also pushing for digital purchase initiation, even for in-store purchases,