I have some cards from Cap1 and Citi that have the name and card information inked on the back instead of the traditional embossing into the plastic.
While they look cleaner and seem to hold up better, they're not exactly backwards compatible with the old "click clack" card imprint machines. It was actually not quite a year ago that I went to a place where the electronic authorization system was not working and they had to take an imprint of my card the old fashioned way.
I get that embossing on metal cards is problematic, and every metal card seems to be "flat" rather than embossed. Some plastic cards are printed this way as well, though it seems most are still embossed, including those from major issuers like Amex, BoA, and Chase.
Cap1 and Citi have some flat plastic cards. Is anyone else doing this? I don't have a Discover card, but it looks like theirs are flat as well. Is there a direction or standard that issuers are moving towards to eventually make all cards this way, or are we likely to still have embossed cards well into the future? Are the imprint machines finally going away for good?
My Discover card is indeed flat just like my Chase and AmEx and quite honestly I prefer it that way. The embossing creates bends in my cards while they’re stacked as well as just looking classier in my opinion.
I ran into that issue with that issue with my Venture One card (which is almost flat but very lightly embossed) at an amusement park in Spring 2016 when a concession stand's machines were down. Ended up using another card instead. The new metal Amex Platinum cards are etched, rather than embossed. I'm not sure what it is about Amex cards but the embossed numbers always became unreadable for me after a few months of being in my wallet.
Most credit card processors would rather that a merchant use an offline authorization rather than an imprint, to answer the question.
At my work we still hand key CC and Debit numbers. One local bank started issueing debit cards that are flat plastic. Within 3 months the the numbers started wearing off and could not be read. They numbers all seem to wear off from left to right. So in the beginning it was OK because we knew the numbers but now about half of the account number is unreadable.
We are about a year in with seeing these cards and the bank has begin issueing cards with embossed numbers again
Does that mean I need to get one of those credit card impressors to hold onto? Showing kids what I had to deal with (aka cassettes, Walkman, 5 1/2” floppy disks, etc) and having them figure it out is pretty entertaining.
