With the development of the range of services provided by credit institutions, the embossing of plastic bank cards is becoming more and more popular. This is a unique technology for applying three-dimensional symbols to products.
What is embossing
Embossing in a broad sense means the creation of three-dimensional drawings and inscriptions. The procedure is carried out by means of special devices - embossers, differing in structure and principle of action, thereby adjusting to the conditions and object for work. Embossing has long been used in scrapbooking: with the help of it, voluminous inscriptions are created on business cards, postcards and other paper products. In addition, the technology has found widespread use in needlework, where it is implemented through such techniques as extrusion and embossing.
Mechanical engineering has become a separate area of application of embossing. Since 2011, three-dimensional drawings and patterns have been applied to the glossy surface of cars (often sports). The same applies to advertising, souvenir and many other areas. However, the technology gained the greatest popularity in banking, when credit organizations began to actively produce personalized payment cards. On the front side of the latter, with the help of embossers, volumetric letter and digital inscriptions are squeezed out to indicate the name of the card holder, individual number and other data.
Embossing of plastic cards
The main purpose of embossing in banking is the personalization of products. The corresponding technology began to be applied in the United States as early as 1920. At that time, convenient automatic embossers did not exist, and the inscriptions were engraved by hand using clichés.
At present, with the development of technologies, the embossing process has become much easier and accelerated, however, the issue of a personalized card, depending on the workload of the bank and the equipment used, can take up to two weeks. Most often, banks order the appropriate engraving from specialized companies so as not to purchase expensive equipment. The latter, among other things, requires fine tuning for each edition of plastic products.
At the moment, the technology available for use does not yet allow creating unique symbols of organizations, for example, their logos, on bank cards. The embossing form only supports a set of base letters and numbers in a specific size and font.
What is the procedure performed on
A modern embosser for creating volumetric inscriptions is an electronic-mechanical device that exerts pressure on the surface to be treated using special templates. A few years ago, such devices were characterized by rather low productivity, processing no more than 20 plastic cards per hour. Today, this equipment can handle much larger volumes of products and allows you to squeeze characters on plastic and metal surfaces, perform encoding of chips and magnetic stripes, as well as color and monochrome printing.
There are manual and automatic embossers. The former are less expensive, but require careful monitoring of the device. Automatic devices are more expensive, but are easily controlled by a computer, into which it is enough to enter the necessary data, and the machine itself will do everything necessary. Moreover, the productivity of the latter is up to 1000 items per hour.
So, thanks to embossing, bank customers were able to order individual payment products with a unique style and advanced functionality. A separate advantage of such cards is that they are almost impossible to counterfeit. In addition, banks create card products with various designs, thereby delimiting the available offers, as well as conveniently keeping records of the products produced.
