To upgrade its sustainable financial services, Citadele Bank will begin issuing its new payment card design made of 95% recycled plastic in the Baltic countries. Furthermore, the new cards include additional features making them easy to use for those with visual impairments.
Instead of the previous X smart, X supreme and X prime cards, customers who want a new payment card will now be able to choose from one of the C (Citadele) cards: C smart, C supreme or C prime. The C cards will have a new design, but in terms of services they will retain all of the benefits of the X cards. Just like before, there will be three levels of C card: smart, supreme and prime. Various colour options will be available for the cards.
"Citadele’s payment cards are beloved throughout the region, so we have created a product which combines our existing benefits with updated, new solutions which matter to our users. For example, the recycled card material is more environmentally friendly. Meanwhile, when developing the card design, we added cut-outs on the edge of the card to help those with visual impairments identify the correct edge for insertion into an ATM or card terminal. Similarly, the card name is printed in Braille to help differentiate between cards if a user has more than one. Although design matters most for some customers, we invite customers to first look at the benefits of each card level and evaluate which services they need,” explains Vladislavs Mironovs, Member of the Citadele Management Board and Chief Strategy Officer.
Citadele Bank issues around 200,000 payment cards to customers in the Baltics every year. At these volumes, the use of recycled plastic for making the cards will significantly reduce the amount of harmful emissions released during the manufacturing process. As before, the new cards will continue to be manufactured in Ukraine.