The familiar horizontal design of credit and debit cards may soon be as distant a memory as carbon paper purchases (anyone remember?). That’s thanks to video-based social media. PayPal recently announced a vertical design for debit and credit cards for its Venmo app, in an interview with Bloomberg, PayPal's vice president of design, Daniela Jorge, said that “the world is becoming more portrait-oriented and vertical-oriented because of apps like TikTok and Instagram””. With this, vertical credit and debit cards can gain many followers.

PayPal isn’t the only one to embrace vertical design. In 2018, Discovery Bank was one of the first banks in the United States to embrace the trend. In December 2020, Bank of America also joined the bandwagon and launched its own portrait style debit card and contactless.

Pandemic may have influenced the trend of vertical credit and debit cards

In addition to Bank Of America, PayPal and Discovery Bank, other banks may start to join the vertical card trend, since contactless payments – which have been gaining more and more followers, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic – are made with the card held vertically.

In addition, digital wallets have gained a lot of popularity and many users end up making payments using the digital version of their cards saved on their smartphones, also vertically. An example is Apple Pay, from Apple, which allows the user to save their cards in Wallet and make payments using their cell phone.

With everything happening vertically, mainly due to the excessive use of cell phones and social networks, it is no surprise that payments have followed the same path. Now, it remains to be seen when Brazilian banks will adopt the proposal for vertical card integration.

Image: Ascannio/Shutterstock

Through which channels you reach those people, classic and out of the box. BGR