As pressure grows to improve the payments industry’s record on sustainability, Tietoevry Banking’s Tapio Vailahti introduces a series of blogs on why and how the payments business can do more for the planet.
Climate change affects us all – and the payments industry has a responsibility to act alongside everyone else. Consumers increasingly demand and value sustainability and expect their bank to act accordingly. In this series of blogs, I’ll outline the issues facing the payments business and explain how banks and other players can take action.
Responsible – and good for business
Apart from being the responsible course of action, improving our sustainability record may soon become a regulatory requirement, based on recent statements from the European Union and other bodies1. What’s more, customers now expect issuing banks to take action on sustainability – as a 2023 position paper from the Smart Payments Association shows.
This research paper found that customer brand loyalty improved when issuers offer card recycling programmes – and that, as a result, 80% of the banks surveyed were considering running their own recycling programmes, with more than half of those banks willing to collaborate on a card recycling scheme.
As I’ll show in this series, however, sustainability runs across the payments lifecycle, and isn’t restricted to card recycling. In 2021, research and advisory firm Celent consulted leading card payment suppliers, including Tietoevry Banking, about their sustainability programmes2. Celent identified three pillars for any successful payments sustainability programme as follows:
- sustainable raw materials for cards and their packaging
- optimized use of all resources throughout the card lifecycle
- cardholder engagement with the objectives and outcomes of a sustainability programme
At Tietoevry Banking, we’ve taken steps in each of these areas. By the end of 2022, over 50% of the payment cards we delivered to customers were made of sustainable materials, rising to 75% by the end of 2023. These numbers make us a global leader – but as I’ll go on to show, there’s more we can do, alongside the entire payments industry, to improve our record and lower our environmental impact.
In future blogs, I’ll go on to look at how the payments industry impacts the environment, the different options for sustainable raw materials, and how to optimize resource use throughout the payments life cycle. Protecting the environment and lowering the impact of our activities is among the greatest challenges facing our generation – and the payments industry must play its part.
For a discussion about improving the sustainability of your bank’s card programme, get in touch with Tapio Vailahti.
1The Smart Payments Association, 18 July 2023: “Payment Card Sustainability”: https://www.smartpaymentassociation.com/publications-smart-payment-association/position-papers-smart-payment-association/entry/payment-card-sustainability-1
2Celent, 16 August 2021: “Saving the Planet with Sustainable Cards”: https://www.celent.com/insights/546686259