3 Ways Push Provisioning Works to Elevate the Digital Payments Experience

April 25, 2023

Extend your central and instant issuance strategy with a complementary digital payment solution to give cardholders the convenience and options they want.

In February 2020, Aite-Novarica Group issued a study of 34 retail banking associates and card services executives that said: “Multiple issuers refer to instant digital card issuance as an alternative to in-branch instant issuance. However, issuers with in-branch instant issuance see this innovation as a complement to, and not a replacement for, issuing cards in the branch.”

Today’s consumers want choice and convenience when it comes to their payment methods. And, creating a smooth and seamless experience for cardholders is critical. Adding digital card issuance to an existing instant issuance solution can round out a strong card-issuing strategy and provide a great customer experience by offering the options cardholders want.

How Push Provisioning Differs from a Digital Card

To fully understand push provisioning, issuers must first recognize its distinct properties.

Push provisioning offers a path for the issuer’s mobile app to securely “push” a payment card into the mobile wallet. Instead of having to input card information as with a physical or digital card, a customer could simply accept a push notification and provision their card into the wallet. And because push provisioning doesn’t require the cardholder to input account information, it provides an added layer of security, limiting exposure of card numbers and other details.

3 Benefits of Push Provisioning

How do these differentiating factors measure up to today’s standards? For both the issuer and the cardholder, push provisioning presents an efficient and convenient solution in three ways:

1

Creates an omnichannel strategy:

Combining a physical card and a digital wallet payment option can increase brand positioning and help to compete for top-of-wallet status. This enables issuers to provide cardholders with payment options that meet their needs, which in turn, may increase card usage, and ultimately the opportunity for interchange revenue.

2

Generates an efficient, quick option:

Depending on how an issuer manages its cardholder account information, push provisioning could become an automatic process once the cardholder is approved, making it a de facto service that offers immediate gratification. In the case of a lost or stolen card, this approach could simplify replacement and provide a near real-time solution to card availability.

3

Establishes a more secure solution:

Because push provisioning requires tokenization, the card identification comes from the association’s (for example, Mastercard^®) secure vault. This process creates a singular key or fingerprint for this card, and each transaction that originates from the digital wallet has a unique identifier, limiting the potential for fraud.

Ready to Implement Push Provisioning?

In today’s convenience-first landscape, card issuers must consider push provisioning as a component of their card issuance strategy to remain competitive.

CPI Card Group stands ready to not only provide a tailored solution but also to guide card issuers in developing a push provisioning strategy that supports cardholder preferences, maximizes revenue potential, and provides education. And that makes for a winning approach now and into the future.