DEALING THE RIGHT CARDS
A Case Study in Personalization

In recent years, wallet-sized plastic cards have become a core product of the document industry, evolving from credit cards into convenient, durable, and portable documents used for a wide variety of applications–anything from medical identification to frequent buyer clubs. Increasingly, card applications are demanding greater degrees of customization with brands, logos, graphics, and photography enabling greater cross-branding opportunities and more convenient service to end-users. To cost-effectively print hundreds of millions of fully customized cards, many printers are using high-speed digital color presses.

Digital color printing allows health care providers, retail stores, airlines, and automobile organizations to cost-effectively provide customized cards to groups and even individuals. Digitally printed cards provide co-branding opportunities, enhance the flow of information, cultivate customer loyalty, and enhance overall brand image.

Personix, a unit of DMIA member company Fiserv, Inc. (Nasdaq: FISV) with production centers in Houston, Indianapolis, and St. Paul, manufactures, personalizes and mails in excess of 100 million plastic cards annually, in addition to providing high-volume laser printing and mailing services, for over 6,000 clients nationwide. In the year 2000, Personix launched eXpress Digital™ to complement its traditional card products. By using a digital color press for its eXpress Digital™ card product, Personix is able to customize cards as well as the documents they are mailed with, providing marketing and communication opportunities with instructions, photography, and graphics. Traditionally, plastic card manufacturing and personalization are two off-line processes; whereas Personix’s new system prints and personalizes in a single pass.

To complete the task, Personix uses a Xeikon DCP/50D Digital Color Press, which provides faster turnaround times, more customization, and greater opportunities for brand enhancement. And because the process is done in one step, integrated digital printing of cards and carriers cuts production costs, and eliminates the need for inventories. Additionally, the enhanced speed is welcome since their Xeikon DCP/50D is capable of personalizing at hourly rates 30 times the number of ID cards produced by a traditional card personalization machine.

Personix uses a Xeikon DCP/50D Digital Color Press as the core of their imaging system.

More Effective Co-branding Opportunities
"Customized communication is of vital importance in many industries today," says Hal Cline, Vice President, Card Sales at Personix. "A good application example is the health care industry. A company may purchase health coverage for all of its employees from a large healthcare provider. With our system, we can actually put the company’s logo (in full color) on the card as well as the insurer's logo. That creates a strong relationship between the insurance company, the employer and the employee. It’s really a co-branding opportunity that has been expensive in the past due to the need to maintain preprinted inventories for each combination of insurer and employer."

Creating these co-marketing opportunities is as much about printing technology as it is about marketing strategy. Cards have, for many years, been created in mass quantities only to be personalized as a last step. "That process required inventories to be kept and a longer overall production time," says Cline.

The Xeikon digital color press allows Personix to produce cards completely unique from one customer to the next. The marketing advantages of co-branding, tailoring and personalizing are readily apparent, but, as Cline points out, there are also key production benefits to digital printing. "We significantly increased our production with this system," says Cline. "Previously we could only personalize 600 cards an hour with traditional card personalization equipment. Now we can print 18,000 personalized cards an hour. And these cards are printed in one step, only as they’re needed—that adds to overall time savings."

The digital printing process also saves customers significant inventory costs. Because each card is created on demand, keeping huge numbers of pre-printed template cards is no longer necessary. Personix previously needed to produce and/or inventory as many as 300 different types of template cards for a single customer. Hundreds of thousands of cards were kept in stock to be ready for additional customers and to accommodate peak renewal orders. "With our new system, we have completely eliminated the need for that inventory," says Cline. "This saves money, speeds up production, and offers our customers a better product. It’s just a better way handling these customer’s products."

To print the cards and carrier, Personix uses a 10-mil Teslin® substrate which is ultimately sandwiched between two five mil laminates. The Xeikon press prints both the card and the carrier, on both sides of the substrate, in one single pass. The carrier is then laminated and cut into 8.5" x 3.75" mailers and is ready to be stuffed in an envelope and mailed. The cards are die-cut, but remain attached to the carrier. The finished cards are removed from the carrier by the recipient.

Personix also relies on printing the front and back of the document at the same time to ensure that information will not be mismatched – a potentially disastrous situation with sensitive information such as social security or account numbers.

Industrial Quantity/Quality
The nature of card production demands printing technology that is both fast and reliable on a very large scale. Personix requires a system than can produce millions of personalized cards each year. "Our business is built on producing cards fast on a normal basis, and even faster at peak times," says Cline. "There’s also very little room for downtime. The nature of cards demands that we produce literally millions of personalized documents. At peak times we have to be capable of printing and processing millions of cards in less than 25 days."

"We can run these very complicated variable jobs with high quality color without concerns about putting strain on the machine or running into downtime" says Cline. Reliability is important to our business. Since this digital printing technology has been developing for almost 10 years, we felt confident in our choice."

For our programs to be effective, cards must have professional color and print quality. "People put trust in many of the cards that they carry in their wallets," says Cline. "The quality of an insurance card can be very reassuring when it’s used in a doctor’s office, for instance. For the user--quality means confidence."

Today’s digital printing technology rivals offset. "It’s really a non-issue when it comes to the print quality" says Cline. "The end-user is getting the quality that is expected of professionally produced cards. They’re not necessarily thinking about the process that created it – and that’s a good thing. That means we’re doing our job well."

About Personix
Personix, a business unit of Fiserv, Inc., is a leading provider of card manufacturing and personalization, high-volume laser printing and mailing and electronic document delivery (EDD) services. The company provides card, EDD and print/mail services for more than 6,000 clients in the financial services, healthcare, investment services, retail and telecommunication industries.

About Fiserv
Fiserv, Inc. (NASDAQ:FISV) is an independent, full-service provider of integrated data processing and information management systems to the financial industry. A DMIA member since 1986, Fiserv serves approximately 13,000 financial service providers worldwide, including banks, brokers/dealers, credit unions, financial planners/investment advisors, insurance companies, mortgage banks and savings institutions. Headquartered in Brookfield, Wis., Fiserv can also be found on the World Wide Web at www.fiserv.com.

BACK TO TOP