Sustainability in Digital Banking
Within the last decade, the world has started to experience the hard impact of climate change. Almost every sphere of human existence and business is hit by different challenges, and humanity has started to turn towards saving the situation. Although we think of the causes for change as cars, factories, and other carbon dioxide emitters, the problem is far deeper than that, and practically every kind of business has an impact, and now has several steps to perform to become green.
The banking sphere is no different. Sustainable payment cards, the latest trend, are oriented at fighting the production of highly oil-dependent plastic cards, but there’s much more to sustainability in digital banking.
How We Design Our Services
For ages, banks were all about customers going to giant golden-plated premises to sit down with their banker and talk money. Imagine if we still did it when almost everyone is a bank’s customer, probably, multiple times. To cope with the demand, we would have to build, maintain, operate, light, and air condition huge spaces so that the customers had a place to come to send a wire transfer.
Luckily, the eco-friendly digital banking that offers sustainable payment cards, minimizes using real bank chains, and decreases the footprint of banking business almost to none, leaving only central offices for the employees. This said, 90% of the recent banking startups, neobanks, including Satchel, provide all their services through web sites and mobile apps, and drop all possible offline locations altogether.
How We Process Your Money
Sustainable payment cards require an eco-friendly way to process the payments. Imagine the enormous data centers required to process billion of transactions for major banks. They have to be built with enough processing headroom to be able to process giant spikes in payments and payment card transactions so that any online purchase during Black Friday gets processed instantly. The fact is, that most of the time, up to 60-70% of these vast computing powers are burning electricity just to be ready to start working instantly. These data centers consume lots of unnecessary energy for servers and cooling and require much more computer parts than would be really required for maintenance.
Luckily, the sustainability in digital banking follows the general strategy of moving processing into the cloud, thus minimizing the energy use and giving the transition to green energy sources to the hands of professionals. The cloud provides payments made with sustainable payment cards with exactly the required amount of processing power and can scale it upwards instantly. The cloud provider can assign free powers to other businesses, or turn off altogether, all seamlessly and instantly. Satchel supports its sustainability strategy by migrating to the Amazon Cloud and offering virtual payment cards.
How We Issue Your Cards
Almost $1 trillion worth of payments a year are processed without real-world cards, using virtual cards only. These cards have exactly the same possibilities with an exception of that they are stored safely in your device or in your secure web banking app. This way, sustainability in digital banking is achieved by omitting the very issuance of oil-based plastic cards that require tons of energy to be manufactured, in the first place.
Like most of the modern banking service providers, Satchel provides its customers with all sorts of virtual payment cards, instantly and with no carbon footprint.
How We Issue Your Cards… For Real
If you do need real-world sustainable payment cards, most responsible banking businesses already have the transition in their strategy. Card providers experiment with alternative materials, including plant-based plastics, recyclable metal alloys, or non-toxic chemical compounds. This said Mastercard is looking into introducing wooden payment cards, produced from responsibly managed forestry. Satchel is also looking forward to the experiment results and certification of new sustainable payment cards as another chapter in its whole sustainability in digital banking story.
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Sustainability in digital banking is coming quickly and is achieved by implementing many more things than simply sustainable payment cards. No walk-in banking chains, minimized office space, migration to cloud technology, and the very sustainable payment cards are introduced in a complex to offset the banking sphere’s carbon footprint. Satchel is constantly working on new greener solutions to offer sustainable payment cards to all its users in the foreseeable future.
