Our internal auditors are telling us that the 'Industry Standard' for issuing ATM cards would be to mail them instead of 'instantly' issuing them at our branches. We issue a very low volume of those because if the customer has a checking account, we offer them a debit card instead.

Does anyone still issue ATM cards at their branches? Or do you just mail cards?

Has anyone started to issue debit cards 'instantly' at their branches?

Jaime, welcome to BankersOnline!

My institution still does. Generally we use the instant issue cards for emergency situations (customer's card is stolen and they're leaving town tomorrow, and they HAVE to have a card.)

We also have some customers who only have a savings account which we will not make a primary account on a debit card so we don't run into Reg D transaction monitoring issues.

The issue we run into on checking accounts is that we end up with a lot of inactive instant issue cards that the customer no longer uses/needs once they receive a new debit card. This presents a liability risk if the cards are misplaced and costs the bank money since we pay our processor a monthly fee for each issued card.

We looked into instant issue cards and are holding off due to cost considerations, but we'll look again in 6 months. While mailing may now be the 'industry standard', a number of banks are looking at instant issue as another service to their customers. Our auditor had no problem if we were to switch, conditioned upon the controls we would've had in place.

We have instant issue here at the main office, but not in the branches. We're a 4 branch $240 Million institution.

Can you clarify when you say instant issue, are you referring to ATM or debit cards?

I would guess the industry standard is to mail debit cards, but instant issue ATM cards when necessary (emergency to hold them over until the debit card comes OR when they only have a savings account).

Our core vendor at my former bank had a nice feature. When issuing a debit card to someone with an existing ATM card, you could put the ATM card number in the 'memo' field of the debit card. When the debit card was activated the ATM card would get cancelled via a nightly program. So that helped to manage the number of cards out there when issuing in an emergency situtaion.