IDEMIA’s GREENPAY Solution Sees Rapid Adoption as Payments Become More Sustainable

One of the leading credit market companies in the Scandinavian region, Entercard, has begun migrating its credit card portfolio to recycled PVC leveraging IDEMIA’s GREENPAY sustainable payment solution from September 2022.

By leveraging IDEMIA’s GREENPAY solution, Entercard has echoed the movement seen elsewhere in the market by banks and payment companies, such as Aspiration, TCM Bank, and GoHenry, in signaling its intent to significantly reduce its carbon footprint, energy, and new raw material consumption and disposal which will reduce overall pollution in the environment. This movement also seeks to reinforce Entercards’ own dedication to sustainability and its intent to meet the expectations of an eco-minded userbase.

IDEMIA’s GREENPAY solution has been adopted in a series of partnerships with banks and financial institutions in all regions. French banking group Societe Generale, awarded “Bank of the Year for Sustainability” by the International Financing Review, has partnered with IDEMIA since 2021 to offer its first Visa-branded recycled PVC (rPVC) payment card range. This was followed by BNP Paribas Personal Finance SA Paris Bucharest, which began issuance in Brazil in August 2021 for the first Cetelem cards made of rPVC. As part of the GREENPAY portfolio, the sustainable card leverages a number of eco-friendly inks.

Also, HSBC Bahrain announced that it would deploy sustainable payment cards from August 2022 and complete its move away from single-use PVC payment cards by the end of 2026, exchanging its portfolio for recycled PVC, as per HSBC Group’s strategy. HSBC has elected to do this as part of its debit, credit, and commercial card strategy to move towards sustainable rPVC and is a part of the bank’s strategy to reduce its carbon emissions and achieve net zero in its operations and supply chain by 2030 or earlier.

More recently, Merpay, the subsidiary of the Mercari Group, Japan’s largest community-powered marketplace, launched their first recycled PVC credit card using IDEMIA’s GREENPAY solution.

The GREENPAY portfolio is wide-ranging: not just because of its ability to migrate a card portfolio to a more sustainable solution than first-use plastics, but also because it demonstrates to a customer base the willingness to integrate ESG goals into the core structure of the payments industry with the following features:

• Sustainable materials used in payment cards
• Sustainable or reusable packaging materials
• GREENPAY product/service carbon offsetting
• End-of-life card recycling and disposal
• Migration away from paper-based services
• Shorter travel distances and cleaner methods of transport to reduce carbon emissions

It is becoming critical to understand the consumer and values the consumers are increasingly placing on sustainability from the businesses they transact with. This is very much visible in the payments market with cardholders and prospective customers willing to select or transfer to banks that reflect their global values by developing and adopting sustainable banking practices. A vast majority of consumers prefer their bank to actively contribute to preserving the planet and offering sustainable material payment cards. Of course, consumers should not find themselves misled as it relates to how sustainable a bank’s portfolio is, but the message of what is being offered and how it is sustainable should be communicated to open the doors to a wider potential customer base and to maximize the Return on Investment (ROI) into sustainable solutions.

The sustainable payment card is moving away from being a simple product offering and is now expanding into a suite of services. With the ecological market expanding quickly and more solutions entering the arena, marketing for eco card solutions should pivot around it as a solution, rather than a standalone product. Understand that to truly unlock the potential of such a solution, it is not a simple migration process in terms of the straight replacement of a PVC card. The entire workflow must be managed, including card end-of-life.