Many businesses think that white label cards are just regular cards with their business’s logo on them. While this is partially true, custom debit cards offer far more benefits than just an appealing look. Let’s explore the advantages white label debit cards can bring to both traditional and online-first businesses.
What Benefits do White Label Cards Have?
While there is certainly no shortage of payment options these days, in many European countries (including the UK and Spain), Visa and Mastercard cards are the preferred choice. By partnering with a licensed financial institution, you can ensure that the card your customers carry bears your company’s name, offering another powerful touchpoint with your customers. This opens up the opportunity to integrateloyalty programs and thus gather and analyze customer data, and much more.
Do you really need a financial institution as a partner then? Independently, you could issue prepaid cards or cards used for limited purposes – like collecting loyalty points. However, these cards are no match for a real white label debit card linked to a bank account. To be able to issue such cards, having a trustworthy financial partner is a must.
What Businesses Can Issue White Label Debit Cards?
Businesses might want to issue custom cards for their customers, colleagues, and partners for a variety of reasons. These range from day-to-day operations to providing cardholders cashback at select stores.
How does the process of issuing custom cards work? It’s relatively straightforward. During white label card issuing, the financial institution issues cards and then sells or grants the use of those cards to a second company. This company can add its logo and other branding elements to the cards in the process.
White label solutions allow your company to offer debit cards without having to spend the time and money building the underlying infrastructure from scratch.
Should you Build an In-House Payment Infrastructure Yourself?
Significant maintenance and development costs are associated with building any kind of payment infrastructure. As a rule, these costs are higher than the fees that would be paid for integrating or embedding a similar payment infrastructure solution from a specialized provider.
How White Label Debit Cards Improve the Customer Journey?
Among the many benefits of white label cards is their integration into the existing customer journey, which provides a simplified payment experience. For instance, by providing its own debit card to its users, an e-commerce platform can offer a seamless way of not just paying, but also accumulating points, receiving cashback, and more.
Unlike generic debit cards, a white label card is entirely branded with the company’s logo, design, and color scheme. Every time a customer uses their card, it’s a direct interaction with the company’s brand. This provides an opportunity to create a unique and personalized experience that strengthens brand recognition and loyalty.
By offering special benefits, discounts, or rewards associated with the company’s products or services, white label debit cards can create a strong incentive for customers to continue doing business with the company, thereby fostering loyalty. For example, customers might earn points for every dollar spent on the card, which could be redeemed for discounts or freebies.
Moreover, in today’s data-conscious world, customers might feel more comfortable sharing their financial information with a known business, rather than third-party payment processors. In this way, white label debit cards can offer a secure, trusted payment solution that respects customer privacy.
How Can White Label Cards Unlock Additional Revenue Streams?
White label debit cards present businesses with an opportunity to generate easily scalable revenue streams. There are many ways to do so, but the main ones to keep in mind are transaction fees and interchange income.
Let’s start with transaction fees. You can set up an agreement with your card processing partner to earn a portion of the transaction fees. These fees are usually small amounts charged for processing a card transaction, but as the volume of transactions goes up, so does your share of revenue.
Depending on your business model and customer preferences, you can also choose to charge cardholders certain fees, such as monthly management fees, ATM withdrawal fees, or fees for specific services. However, this decision should be balanced against the potential to discourage card use.
Interchange income (also called interchange fees) is another potential source of revenue. These are fees paid by the merchant’s bank to the cardholder’s bank for each card transaction. While the company issuing the debit card doesn’t receive the full interchange fee, they could negotiate a portion of it with their banking or card issuing partner.
In conclusion, while offering white label debit cards requires an initial investment and ongoing operational resources, the potential for additional revenue from transaction fees and interchange income can make it a profitable strategy for many businesses.
The Flexibility and Adaptability of White Label Cards
As we’ve seen, white label debit cards offer businesses a high degree of customization and control over their payment solutions. They provide companies with ways to tailor their cards to fit their unique business model and customer base, including the design of the card, the structure of the rewards program, and the types of fees charged. This flexibility means that businesses can adapt their card program as market conditions or customer preferences change, ensuring that their payment solution always aligns with their strategic goals.
White label debit cards are designed to scale easily with a company’s growth. As the customer base expands, businesses can issue more cards without significant changes to the existing infrastructure. The process of issuing cards, managing transactions, and maintaining customer accounts is largely automated, making it easy to accommodate more users. Moreover, since most of the operational complexity is handled by the card issuing partner, businesses can focus on their core operations while their card program grows.
In conclusion, the flexibility and scalability of white label debit cards provide a powerful platform for businesses to develop and grow their payment solutions in line with their evolving needs. By offering a payment method that can adapt to changing market dynamics and customer preferences, businesses can ensure that their payment solution remains relevant, competitive, and valuable to their customers.
