Free Whitepaper - The Ins and Outs of Card Testing
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The magnetic stripe, optical bar code, or chip on a card exists to store data that can be retrieved at a later date. If the data on the card cannot be retrieved when a customer tries to make a transaction, you negatively impact the interaction between customer and merchant. Custom satisfaction suffers.To reduce the risk of negatively impacting custom satisfaction because of a failed card transaction, manufacturers must test their cards prior to distributing them to customers.

Card testing must account for a range of standards and emerging technologies. Established standards for testing include ISO/IEC/ANSI, EMV, but card manufacturers may need to test against proprietary and developing standards.

Magnetic stripe is a ubiquitous technology to encode custom data on a card, but modern cards provide a mix of technologies, including optical bar coding, smartcards, and conactless/RFID (radio frequency identification). Add the emerging consumer demand for green card materials and manufacturing processes and the need for an extensive card testing program becomes self-evident.

If you ship a card with data that cannot be retrieved, your card and your brand fail. A challenging economic environment does not mitigate the need to engage in an extensive card testing program. The expense required discovering problems through testing or ensuring quality is a fraction of the cost your business will incur if your cards fail in the marketplace.

In addition to making the decision to test, you need to decide if you should develop in-house testing expertise or partner with a third-party testing laboratory. We’ll examine the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.We’ll also review some real-world test scenarios where Q-Card helped card manufacturers diagnose and fix card quality issues.

Should you do the tests yourself or should you outsource the testing to an independent laboratory? Either choice has advantages and disadvantages. Click here to download our free whitepaper.