VISA Cards, Millennials and the Walking Dead

By Lauren Keyson and Bárbara Gesteira Josh Flowers is the CFO of Card.com, a personalized mobile alternative to the average person to replace their checking account. The reason their slogan is “CARD.com is the prepaid card that’s fun to use” is because every card is personalized with thousands of images like the Three Stooges and The Walking Dead. Josh Flowers: We provide an account in the cloud that is indirectly FDIC insured to the money you save, where you can receive your paycheck, transact and pay, along with their own personalized VISA card. I met my wife through yoga so I have my yoga Zen-type design, but we have thousands of designs from Elvis and James Dean for the Brooklyn hipster to Sesame Street and Care Bears for the Midwest housewife to anything that people want.  We want to make it available to them. Lauren Keyson: You do something specific for Millennials, don't you? JF: Yes -- we use data, science and analysis to run our marketing, so all of our marketing is decided by quant Ph.Ds. meaning, through online resources in social media and the data rich environments. We want to know as much as possible, so we take 10 data points on a person like: sex, age, geo location, device type, time of day, and that they were just looking at a kitty cat video on YouTube. Then we use all that information and our big quant models to make a decision. What image to show them, what they may respond to, what they are passionate about, what they're interested in to attract them to our product. When they look at it, they discover it's better, faster, cheaper than their actual bank account, and then they switch. So they may be scrolling through Facebook and we'll have an advertisement. They may be searching, they may go to Google (and Google knows a lot about you). But if they just happen to Google to look for "cat and card" then our algorithms may find that and win the bid to show them Garfield on a VISA card. When they click on an advertisement they come to our website landing on that exact product, not a general product already tailored with the design. We have a staff that makes all the cool images. They work with professional licenses -- you just can't put Elvis on a VISA card, you have to first license that right from the estate of Elvis.