Brands Can Learn From Mastercard’s Accessible Card Design

Moments after Mastercard chief marketing and communications officer Raja Rajamannar finished his talk on experiential storytelling and stepped off the stage at SXSW 2019, a colleague from Mastercard approached him to casually pitch a new product: a credit card for people who are blind or have limited vision. One of the hot topics of conversation at the annual interactive festival for tech, media and music that year was accessible and inclusive product design. All this got Rajamannar thinking: What would it take to develop a card that was more accessible and inclusive, particularly for blind people? How would it even work? For Rajamannar, the issue was a personal one. Growing up in India, he lived with a grandmother who had gone blind in her elder years, and he recalls helping her navigate from room to room of the family home. In the months following SXSW, these experiences motivated him to build a business case and form a cross-functional team to ultimately introduce the Touch Card, a card design that uses distinct “notches” to help people distinguish between debit, credit or prepaid cards. Despite all the positive media attention surrounding its 2021 launch, the process of creating the Touch Card was fraught with complications. The final product is the result of intentional, consistent and often painstaking efforts from a diverse team of stakeholders to create a new product entirely from scratch. In an interview with Adweek, Rajamannar delved into the enormous challenges involved with introducing the Touch Card and how his team’s trials and triumphs are instructive for any brand looking to innovate to both meet society’s needs and build a profitable enterprise. Expand the range of disciplines at hand. Accessible design principles, the day-to-day experiences of a blind person: These aren’t areas of expertise for a typical marketing leader, nor for most employees. When an engineer designs a new credit card, that individual might not be well placed to understand how people who are blind or have limited vision might use the card. That engineer must be empowered to connect with the right experts who can help make these judgments. That’s why deeply involving external stakeholders in identifying the dimensions of a problem and then designing and implementing solutions—or “co-creation”—is critical. For this project, Mastercard decided to work with the Royal National Institute of Blind People in the U.K. and the nonprofit Visions/Services for the Blind and Visually Impaired in the U.S. “Their feedback and consumer insights allowed us to create more impact than we ever could have alone,” Rajamannar said. By now, marketing leaders have become used to calls for better strategic alignment across their organizations and partner networks. To become more accessible and inclusive, they need to consider ethicists, sociologists and domain experts to understand the social needs they are targeting and to execute their strategies. Their table just got bigger. Focus your experts. Expert advice is vital to the success of any innovation project, but too much—or expertise that is too broad or vague—can be detrimental. Eschewing broad, academic explorations, Rajamannar and his team focused every conversation with external experts around simple questions that needed a solution: How does a blind person use a credit or debit card every day? What are their pain points? The Mastercard team discovered blind individuals rely on “tactile identifiers” on the card itself (e.g., the chip and the card’s embossed lettering) to discern one card from another and to tell if the card is oriented correctly in an ATM or POS terminal. With banks phasing out embossed-lettered and -numbered cards in favor of smoother-surfaced cards, the idea of notches became a powerful organizing principle. Credit cards would have a round notch; debit cards a broad, squarish notch; and prepaid cards a triangular notch. “This very simple solution came from very simple questions,” Rajamannar said. “But this was just the beginning of the journey, not the end.” Build a compelling business case. While many businesses may look at accessibility as a societal and ethical imperative, they should also quantify the impact of initiatives on the bottom line and brand value, to justify their investment and allocation of resources. How would a new card improve the customer experience—and thus retention—for people who are blind or have limited vision? How many new customers could the company attract by designing an inclusive and accessible new product? Alternatively, how is the lack of a credit card for blind customers affecting their user experience and perception of the brand? Rajamannar knew the case for innovation had to be made, and it had better be compelling. One of the first things he did was estimate the size of the total addressable market for the Touch Card. Based on his analysis, there are roughly 2.2 billion people in the world with some degree of vision loss—and millions more who want brands to tackle important social problems like accessibility. “This is not just philanthropy; there is a sound business case here,” Rajamannar said. “And on top of that, there is also a real trust-generating opportunity for the banks and card issuers at a broad societal level.” Push for ‘visible’ senior management support. The pursuit of game-changing innovation typically only works when the C-suite visibly sponsors and participates in the work. The Touch Card was not initially part of Mastercard’s strategic innovation agenda, nor were there resources set aside for the project. To win over his colleagues on the C-suite, Rajamannar and his team articulated the business case, market research and results from multiple rounds of test-and-learn experiments for the Touch Card.“Having our CEO be an advocate for our work allowed us to have the resources and prioritization to make our ideas a reality,” Rajamannar said. “Having support from the top is crucial to being able to work effectively cross-functionally and bring in the right partners.” Gather data to understand ecosystem challenges. Core to the Touch Card’s successful launch was understanding the specific needs of every player in the Mastercard ecosystem. Among the participants in the complex payments industry are the customer, merchant, issuer (the financial institution that issues cards to customers), acquirer (the financial institution that provides merchants with the means to accept card payments), and the card network (which sets the standards by which acquirers and issuers should communicate). What kind of changes were needed to make the card a reality? Rajamannar and his team spent months conducting a needs assessment with companies including NCR, which manufactures ATM machines, and Idemia, which designs the circuit train and antenna system in the cards. Once Mastercard determined the needs of each ecosystem player and secured their participation, the development work could begin in earnest. To ensure the broadest possible buy-in from merchants, the R&D team designed the card to be hassle-free for merchants, with no major changes needed to their existing payment systems, point-of-sale terminals and software. The banks, however, were a tougher stakeholder to persuade. “If a bank has to reissue cards, that’s a big expense, and they need to have a business case,” Rajamannar said. Perhaps swayed by the market size of people who are blind or have limited vision, nearly 30 major banks have signed up to launch the Touch Card to date. Put marketing in charge of cross-functional collaboration. In classic innovation structures, the marketing organization conceptualizes a new product based on company strategy, the project team gets input from various areas of the company and creates a business case and senior executives make a final choice from among the possibilities they’re given. Only then does the idea go to research and development. In the case of the Touch Card, Rajamannar knew he needed to involve not only designers but also technical experts in the innovation process from the very beginning. Once Rajamannar built his business case and brought senior management on board, he created a cross-functional working group and insisted the global marketing team should lead it. The team included members from brand, communications, business-to-business and consumer marketing, product, treasury, finance, cyber and intelligence, franchise, the intellectual property law department, legal, card structure integrity and sales. In the end, the use of interdisciplinary teams helped the marketing organization gain a deeper understanding of product development and the technical realities surrounding credit cards. As Rajamannar admitted, every project is a learning opportunity, and his biggest takeaway from the Touch Card project was that innovation teams must be willing to pivot. “It’s important to change course when needed and to be open to the ideas of people around you,” he said, “even when it’s out of that person’s expertise. When we put our assumptions aside and break down silos, we can accomplish much more than we think is possible.” This story is part of Adweek’s New Consumer digital package, which focuses on diversity in all the ways it manifests for consumers—including gender, race, age and ability—and how marketers need to reach people where they are and meet their unique needs.

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What Brands Can Learn From Mastercard’s Accessible Card Design

The 2-year effort is a blueprint on innovating for accessibility

Paul Barbagallo

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Paul Barbagallo