G+D Redesigns the Last Mile of Payment Card
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 the 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, and 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 the first transaction.
Thousands of payment cards are returned by 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, according to 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 synchronises corrections across CRM and personalisation 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-personalisation 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.
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.”
