Walk in with Documents, Walk out with a Credit Card! Date:   Sunday , December 07, 2014 CMS Info Systems is a cash management services company in India and the leader in each of its related businesses including Managed IT Services, Card Personalisation, Print & Digital Solutions and the CMS Institute. Banking services in India is going through a paradigm shift following customer expectations that are blurring the lines between different service categories. Where earlier financial services were expected to deliver on security and reliability, even at the cost of time and convenience, it is now all about instant and convenient, (without of course compromising security). Banks have been looking increasingly to create differentiators that have tangible value to their customers. What started with anytime money, longer banking hours, instant or pre-approved loans to instant account openings, has now become a continuous cycle of service innovations with banks looking at every potential customer experience points where they can plug this crucial element in their service delivery. An important segment that grows stronger every year is the card base of banks. According to RBI data, there are about 19.23 million credit cards in the country as on April 2014. Card usage itself is also growing with the amount of credit card transaction at POS (Point Of Sale) was estimated at Rs.14,577 crore when compared to Rs.12,418 crore a year ago. At the top of the pyramid of card users, one finds consumers with multiple credit cards. The battle for these wallets has clearly moved on to value additions and superior service. The power of plastic money that promotes \'buy instantly and pay at leisure\' extends naturally over time to instant acquisition of that power. So far there has been no getting around a process that takes upwards of two weeks, and one has to wait, be it for fresh issuance or replacement of lost cards. This is changing, and we have some interesting technology behind this. Banks and financial institutions issuing credit cards have partnered with banking technology companies to develop a new instant issuance system. The system reduces the time taken in issuing a card from two-three weeks to merely an hour. The process includes documentation, verification, credit check and personalization with specific individualised details encrypted and embedded into the latest EMV (Europay, MasterCard and Visa) chip standard cards. For banks that support personalized images on credit cards, a customer can upload an image to the Internet, then walk into the bank and have the card printed the same day. It\'s important to differentiate between instant issuance and instant issuance of personalised cards with EMV standard. A number of banking and financial institutions in India have been providing its customers with non-personalized EMV debit cards. These are like ready kits that are handed out at the time of opening an account or even a new Instant issuances of credit and debit cards have been successfully deployed in financial institutions in advanced financial markets such as USA, Singapore and Australia. Providing instant personalized credit cards is the step towards global standards of banking. With the emergence of NFC (near field communications), it won\'t be long before the cards will be compliant with NFC personalization capabilities and contact less technology. It is observed that most card users who have received an instant, pre-activated card make their first purchase within eight hours of receiving it. In due course, this substantially reduced cycle time between applying for a card, the receipt of the card by the user and the first usage starts translating into an uptick in interchange revenues, while lowering card production costs. It further helps eliminate the risk of loss, theft or misuse of the card from the time of issuance to receipt by the customer. If required, it also allows the bank an opportunity to educate the customers on the benefits of the card and makes sure that it is working properly during the interaction, which is not possible if the card is delivered later to the customer. As instant card issuance gains importance within a bank\'s value offerings, the next step would be to replace their ongoing central card issuance process so that the customer can be issued with a card - debit or credit - at the branch level itself. At CMS Info Systems, recently we have introduced a new technology solution which enables banks and financial card issuers to seamlessly issue a customized banking card to their customers within an hour. These cards are compliant with the latest EMV standards for secure payments. Instant issuance of cards thus not only brings a host of benefits for the consumers - including convenience, faster turnaround times, lower prices and personalized products - but is also a valuable tool for opening up and developing new market segments for banks and financial institutes and merchants. The pace at which new services are being adopted and consumed, I believe it will be only a matter of time when instant credit cards become the norm.