Named or unnamed cards? Choose the right option for your business

When it comes to building a financial proposal with cards, there is a key decision that often goes unnoticed but directly impacts user experience, operational costs, and scalability strategy: should you offer nominated, non-nominated, or both types of cards?

In this article, we explain the fundamental differences between these two options, the role played by the industry you belong to, and how you can leverage our next-gen technology to adapt swiftly to the market.

What does it mean for a card to be nominated or non-nominated?

Although functionally both types of cards operate in the same way and can be credit, debit, or prepaid, the difference lies in the details: security, personalization, and operational costs. These attributes can make the difference depending on the use and the experience you want to provide. Let's look at it in detail:

Nominated cards: identity and traceability

• Personalized: physical cards issued with the user's name printed. They are associated with that user from the time of issuance.
• Common uses: credit and debit cards.
• Physical validation: ideal when physical identity verification is required.
• High security: greater accuracy when validating the user's identity.

Non-nominated cards: agility and scalability

• No printed name: not issued for a specific holder, they are associated with the user once received from the issuer's app.
• High security: protect personal data from fraud and cloning.
• More agile: reduce issuance times and logistical costs.

Frequent uses:

• Prepaid cards from fintechs, exchanges, and digital banks
• Gift cards
• Virtual wallets
• Corporate programs or internal incentives

Factors to consider when choosing them

Nominated cards involve a more robust identity validation process, which can be a positive differentiator in more traditional financial or corporate products or with a non-digital-native audience. Unnamed cards, on the other hand, allow for faster and more widespread activations, keeping up with current times.

With Pomelo, both models can coexist on the same infrastructure, allowing you to quickly adapt to regulatory changes or new audiences without redesigning your architecture from scratch.

In fintech launches or rapid execution campaigns and massive programs, such as subsidies or scholarships, unnamed cards offer advantages of time and simplicity. However, as the relationship with the end-user strengthens, many companies migrate to named models to add functionalities, traceability, and personalized value propositions, or new products like credits.

With Pomelo, you don't need to choose just one type of card

At Pomelo, we offer you a modular infrastructure that supports both named and unnamed cards. You can integrate everything simply, without needing to develop each component from scratch.

Our solution allows you to:

• Issue and manage both types of cards throughout Latin America.
• Configure limits, usage rules, and specific restrictions according to the type of card.
• Tokenize the cards to integrate them with Google Pay and Apple Pay for NFC payments.
• Scale your product to other markets without redesigning the user experience.