Australian multinational banking company Westpac has announced the launch of a suite of new card designs, to make payments more accessible for disabled customers. The services will include credit cards, debit cards, and pre-paid cards.

These are set to incorporate new accessibility elements, including different notches on the short edge to offer customers the possibility to distinguish their payment cards from one another in an easier way. The solutions were designed with the focus on being accessible for blind and low vision customers, Westpac aiming to meet their needs in a secure and efficient way. By using the Mastercard Touch Card feature, the notches will offer clients and users the possibility to identify the card and orient the card correctly when using it for making transactions or at an ATM.

The notches will be square for credit cards, round for credit cards, and triangular for pre-paid cards. The products will also incorporate a braille marker which is set to provide another tactile feature to customers in order for them to distinguish between credit, debit, and prepaid cards. They will be progressively rolled out by Westpac in the market.

Westpac’s strategy of development The Australia-based bank Westpac had multiple partnerships and product launches in the last couple of months, covering several geographic areas around the world. In May 2023, the company deployed a solution from Finastra to accelerate compliance with the new ISO 20022 financial messaging standard. The deal offered the bank the capability to make use of the benefits of ISO 20022’s data-rich MX messaging format while maintaining backward compatibility with other previous messaging formats, without the need to modernise the entire payments network.

In the same month, Westpac collaborated with Cogo, a carbon footprint management fintech, for carbon footprint tracking capabilities. The product was designed to provide clients with an estimate of their carbon emissions that were tracked from spending from their eligible accounts. This was based on aggregating industry categories, such as home energy, car fuel, or groceries.

The bank rolled out a new security feature called Westpac Verify in March 2023, to protect users from fraud. The new feature was set to notify clients if there was a potential account name mismatch for payments and transfers made to a new BSB and account number, through the New Payments Platform (NPP). Users needed to receive an alert if they transferred money to an account that Westpac did not transact with previously.

In both instances, the payment process was paused for a period of four hours, and customers received an SMS prompting them to review the transfer. .