A vendor has announced a method of instant card issuance it said will allow credit unions to deliver active debit and credit cards to members at the branch with much less risk.

Shoreline Business Solutions has roughly 1,300 financial institution clients, about 40% of which are credit unions, and has dubbed the new service Cards in an INSTANT.

Instant card issuance lets credit unions create activated debit and credit cards at specialized printers in their branches. Instant issued cards have been shown to have much higher activation and usage rates than cards which are delivered by other methods and then rely on cardholders to activate them.

Brian Calabro, vice president of strategic partnerships at Rhode Island-based Shoreline, said instant issuance has been most useful when opening new accounts or replacing lost or stolen cards.

“This is not really something for the regular reissuing expiring cards,” Calabro said, “both because those files are really very large and because you aren't going to make someone just getting a card reissued to come all the way into the branch.”

In addition, providing instantly issued cards requires a credit union to comply with regulations from Visa and MasterCard overseeing the storage and handling of the card stock as well as the data necessary to produce the cards. It's the latter security that Calabro said Cards in an INSTANT can help eliminate.

“Most of the security requirements around handling live card stock are similar to those for handling large amounts of cash or other negotiable instruments,” he said. “But if a credit union uses our cloud-based Cards in an INSTANT it will not have to worry about keeping the data for creating a new card on its own computers,” he said.

Calabro explained Shoreline works closely with a credit union's core processor so that when a request for a new account is made, the data unique to the member and the member's new card both arrive at the branch printer at the same time.

Instant Insights /

Firm Offers Instant Card Issuance With Less Risk

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