Munich, May 13 : Issuing a payment card is one part, getting cardholders to use it, is another story. Despite record card-in-force numbers – there are now more than 648 million credit card accounts in the United States alone, according to Federal Reserve Bank of New York – activation remains one of the unresolved friction points in banking and financial services.
The reasons are prosaic: mail that arrives late, onboarding flows that confuse rather than guide, packaging that offers no prompt to act. The cumulative effect is commercially significant. And the window for activation – the days between card dispatch and first use – is narrow.
G+D is addressing this directly, and is expanding its Convego product range with a set of new solutions and capabilities designed to close the delivery-to-activation gap: AI-supported, autonomous address validation; NFC-enabled physical mailers and kiosk-based instant pickup. Each targets a potential failure point in the journey from production to first transaction.
Fixing the address – before the card ships
Thousands of payment cards are in the returned mail every month. Between 10-20% of returned mail is due to incorrect addresses, such as addresses mistyped by the cardholder, and between 60-75% of returns are due to addresses being undeliverable, from G+D’s own expertise. A card that never arrives cannot be activated. Address error is the earliest – and most avoidable – point of failure in physical issuance, yet it is routinely left to downstream processes to detect.
Convego validAIgent shift this check to the front of the workflow. Using agentic AI, the solution validates address data before shipment, flags likely undeliverables, and synchronizes corrections across CRM and personalization systems. For mail that has already been returned, it can proactively contact cardholders via in-app messaging, confirm a new address, and automatically trigger re-personalization and redelivery. Further capabilities include CASS-certified validation for U.S. markets, intelligent address-correction suggestions, and analytics to surface address-quality trends across the issuer’s portfolio. With Agentic Issuance components, modern card issuance is taken to the next level. The practical effect: fewer returns, lower re-issuance costs, and cards that reach customers faster.
The package that tells you it has arrived
Physical delivery typically ends with a payment card in an envelope and a generic instruction leaflet. There is no prompt, no moment of engagement – just a hope that the customer notices, reads and acts. Convego Smart Packagechanges that by embedding a low-energy Bluetooth (BLE) tag in the card packaging. When the package comes within proximity of the recipient’s mobile device, it triggers a notification – via SMS or within the banking app – confirming arrival and prompting activation. The tag is device-agnostic (iOS and Android), secured with a unique identifier, and designed for long battery life.
Instant pickup: when mail is not the answer
Some customers prefer not to wait for postal delivery, or can’t be easily reached. Also, there might be less reliable postal infrastructure in their regions. Convego Quick Cardprovides a secure, self-service alternative. After approval, the cardholder receives an authorization code, selects a convenient kiosk location, authenticates, and collects their card within seconds. The solution supports newly approved cards and emergency replacements for existing customers.
For issuers, kiosk-based dispensing eliminates packaging and shipping steps, shortens time-to-first-use, and can optimize operational cost.
One platform, configurable to the issuer’s priorities
Inventory management, card design, fulfillment, and customer communications play a key role in the last mile of the issuing process. Accordingly, G+D’s Convego Service market provides an infrastructure for modern issuance services. Banks and FinTechs can adopt capabilities individually or in combination, integrating them into existing workflows rather than replacing them.
Eric Megret-Dorne, Global Head of Issuance Services at G+D, explains
“Data and AI makes card issuance more efficient and autonomous: Verifying the destination, selecting the right channel, reducing the steps between card receipt and first transaction – without adding complexity for the cardholder or the issuer’s operational teams. With concrete, deployable levers we are targeting potential failure points that issuers can solve on their own terms and timeline – as agentic as they want issuance of a card to be.”